


chronicles of the travelers

by tiredzaya



Series: FFXIVwrite [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amaurotine Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Angst, Au Ra Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Banter, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Idiots in Love, M/M, Multiple Warriors of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Named Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Non-Sexual Intimacy, Nonbinary Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal Spoilers, Tumblr: FFXIVwrite2020, headcanons about dark knight and magic, here we make up our own lore and die, sort of.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 44,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiredzaya/pseuds/tiredzaya
Summary: for where you walk, fate shall surely follow. // FFXIVwrite2020 anthology! (subject to slight edits/improvements in the future :3)day 30: the better path || emet-selch wishes he didn't have a student sometimes. (and maybe sometimes, he wishes they would stay.)
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch & Original Character(s), Jacke Swallow/Warrior of Light, Magnai Oronir/Original Character(s), Raubahn Aldynn & Warrior of Light, Sadu Dotharl & Warrior of Light, Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch & Warrior of Light, Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)/Original Character(s), Warrior of Light/Thancred Waters, Ysayle Dangoulain/Warrior of Light
Series: FFXIVwrite [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2069985
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10
Collections: Final Fantasy Write Prompt Challenge 2020





	1. table of contents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Collection of all the prompt fills for the FFXIV Write 2020 challenge, now available to anyone - not just Tumblr! Featuring Zaya Qestir, «AUDEŌ», family, friends, and probably some random strangers they've bumped into along the way.
> 
> _General spoilers apply to all of MSQ, as I've finished MSQ, but anything blatantly spoiler-y will be tagged in the table of contents and the summary of said chapter!_

DAY ONE: [the devoted and the dead](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/63888133#workskin) || **general 5.0/** **shadowbringers spoilers ||** _prompt: crux_

Gen; Taban travels to Eorzea in the wake of the Eighth Umbral Calamity expecting nothing but land and finds the organization devoted to saving their heroes instead.

.

DAY TWO: [call of the sea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/63977029) || **post 5.3, no (direct) spoilers for MSQ** || _prompt: sway_

Jacke/Warrior of Light (Tehra'ir Naphto); Jacke, and the siren (?) that sits at the end of the Rogues’ Guild’s dock.

.

DAY THREE: [til the dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64063054) || **post 5.3, spoilers for MSQ** || _prompt: muster_

Thancred/Warrior of Light (Zaya Qestir); Zaya’s a bit clingy when they’re tired and in love, and Thancred’s very much enamored with all of it. And them. Even if he’s going to be a bit stubborn about it. (Or; two lovebirds resting til dawn.)

.

DAY FOUR: [touch of death](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64124176) || **shadowbringers spoilers, "The Oracle of Light"** || _prompt: clinch_

Gen; Thancred has always been decent with heroic entrances.

.

DAY FIVE: [sentimental fallacy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64127251) || **post-Qitana** Ravel || **CW: animal death + blood** || _prompt: matter of fact_

Gen; Emet-Selch is simply out for a stroll, because even Ascians would like a rest now and then. (He does not expect to almost get shot in the head.)

.

DAY SIX: [for you the flowers bloom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64156339) || **post 5.3, spoilers for MSQ** || _prompt: free day ⮞ vernalization_

Original Character/Warrior of Light (Haruki Hagane/A'dewah Tia); Even if spring meets summer only once a year, A’dewah will keep coming back to Doma just to see Haruki smile. (Or; some flowers need the cold to bloom in spring.)

.

DAY SEVEN: [put your feet up](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64240015) || **post 5.3, spoilers for MSQ** || _prompt: nonagenarian_

Thancred/Zaya; Someone’s got to make Thancred sit still.

.

DAY EIGHT: [live a little](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64240129) || **sapphire weapon spoilers, sort-of?** || _prompt: clamor_

Gen; What’s the point of a giant mech if you can’t have a little fun with it?

.

DAY NINE: [confidence boost](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64293025) || _prompt: lush_

Gen; It’s all fun and games until they all get invited to an Ishgardian ball. (Or; Lumelle has never liked anything to do with the high society of her hometown. A’dewah tries to help his friend out.)

.

DAY TEN: [words will not suffice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64329589) || **spoilers for 4.4 MSQ, lots of canon divergence** || _prompt: avail_

Gen, with hints of Magnai/Oktai and Sadu/Cirina (not enough to tag lol); Hien does not understand the Steppe as well as he thinks he does. (Or; Hien stop taking advantage of the Steppe challenge.)

.

DAY ELEVEN: [illiteracy for two](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64384066) || **sometime post leviathan** || _prompt: ultracrepidarian_

Gen, technically, hints of pre-relationship Thancred/Zaya; Thancred and Zaya realize that perhaps the Stones’ library is not the best place for writing lessons.

.

DAY TWELVE: [something's electric in your blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64437976) || **pre-calamity & steppe MSQ** || **CW: blood, violence** || _prompt: tooth and nail_

Gen; Zaya is and has always been greater than that Qestir girl waiting for more.

.

DAY THIRTEEN: [our change of heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64486522) || **post 5.3 MSQ** || _prompt: free day ⮞ promises_

Thancred/Zaya; Thancred usually doesn’t keep little trinkets around.

.

DAY FOURTEEN: [hero's journey](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64531384) || **from pre-HW to SHB, spoilers for all** || _prompt: part_

Gen; You are not simply a hero, but this is still your journey, and the parts of you are waiting along the way. All you have to do is take them.

.

DAY FIFTEEN: [a life in your shape](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64560163) || **CW: blood** || _prompt: ache_

Haruki/A'dewah; A’dewah just wants to be loved, no matter how much he’ll have to give. (Or; things don’t necessarily turn out well when you keep falling for guys already in love with your friends.)

.

DAY SIXTEEN: [imprimatur](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64613737#workskin) || _prompt: lucubration_

Gen; Louisoix has a habit of picking up strange people and bringing them back. These two, unlike Thancred, might have something to them that Y’shtola’s interested in.

.

DAY SEVENTEEN: [you found me there](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64666465) || **post 5.3, no explicit spoilers** || _prompt: fade_

Thancred/Zaya; A shade, bringing him his last memory of gentle darkness and thunder.

.

DAY EIGHTEEN: [unburn the ashes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64714654) || **shadowbringers spoilers, amaurot flavor** || _prompt: panglossian_

Thancred/Zaya, in a way, but technically Atalanta/Haik; Even the strongest of storms peter out someday.

.

DAY NINETEEN: [always been my north star](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64765819) || **post 5.3, no explicit spoilers** || _prompt: where the heart is_

Jacke/Tehra'ir; Every Limsan street rat knows that the alleys and crates are not home.

.

DAY TWENTY: [solar eclipse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64814056) || **post 'Naadam'** || _prompt: free day ⮞ perihelion_

Magnai Oronir/Original Character (Oktai Qestir); Oktai thinks this situation must be terribly frustrating to Sadu and Zaya, what with Magnai apparently having made an advance on him after fighting the ironmen and him ignoring it in favor of bleeding. (Or; usually it’s the moon that moves to eclipse the sun.)

.

DAY TWENTY-ONE: [anything that glimmers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64858498) || _prompt: foibles_

Thancred/Zaya; The trinkets that litter Zaya’s path are now in Thancred’s as well. Unfortunate.

.

DAY TWENTY-TWO: [before it's too late](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64904026) || **SHB spoilers, pre-return to Amh Araeng** || _prompt: argy-bargy_

Gen; When even your ghost buddy starts to call you out on relationship matters, it has to be bad.

.

DAY TWENTY-THREE: [i wanna know what you're doing tonight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64927984#workskin) || **'main street' AU/modern AU** || _prompt: shuffle_

Pre-relationship Thancred/Zaya; Does writing music based on things your friend said count as flirting?

.

DAY TWENTY-FOUR: [oh, your love is sunlight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/64982521#workskin) || _prompt: beam_

Thancred/Zaya AND Haruki/A'dewah; The plant-life in Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum sure is something, AKA two melee fools (Haruki and Zaya) get themselves into a little teensy tiny bit of trouble and the local bard (Thancred) and plant nerd (A’dewah) have to kind of sit there and wait. (Well. At least they’re cute.)

.

DAY TWENTY-FIVE: [remember me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/65036302#workskin) || **post 5.3, spoilers** || _prompt: wish_

Thancred/Zaya; _though i have to say goodbye, remember me // don’t let it make you cry_

.

DAY TWENTY-SIX: [defying fate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/65084779) || _prompt: when pigs fly_

Gen; One girl leaves Reunion in a fit of anger and one warrior returns home a decade later.

.

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN: [blurred reflections](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/65131570#workskin) || **right before + during the Naadam** || _prompt: free day ⮞ accept_

Gen; He’s not sure what’s worse: letting the home that took him be leashed for a war or defying the prince of the place his closest friend lives.

.

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT: [there's nowhere love can't reach](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/65161756#workskin) || **post 5.3, no spoilers** || **big ol canon divergence AU** || _prompt: irenic_

Ysayle Dangoulain/Syhrwyda Maetityrbwyn; Not even the gods can keep her from taking winter’s hand.

.

DAY TWENTY-NINE: [how i met your (other) dad](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/65215882) || **sometime in the future** || _prompt: paternal_

Haruki/A'dewah; This story, unfortunately, starts with an Ala Mhigan miqo’te of eight summers being conscripted and taken to Doma…

.

DAY THIRTY: [the better path](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247400/chapters/65262832#workskin) || **5.3 spoilers! many of them!** || _prompt: splinter_

Gen, mostly; Who’s to say which path is better? Who’s to say that without them Zaya would be here today, standing tall with the eternal winds at their back?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all of these fills can also be found on my [tumblr under the tag '#elie's ffxivwrite2020' here](http://fistsoflightning.tumblr.com)! it's also where most of my content is ;)
> 
> if you're interested, i also have a [twitter](https://twitter.com/riddle_of_fire) that i both forget to use and don't post often to, but sometimes i'm there!


	2. table of contents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #1: crux
> 
> .
> 
> SHADOWBRINGERS SPOILERS AHEAD!

Mor Dhona is a sight to behold, crafted in crystal spires that pierce the cloud cover and brilliant violet skies, the ruins of a centuries-old town and war scattered beneath the aether fog. The winds are quiet, but if she listens closely she can hear the remembered laughter and chatter of a lively place, filled with adventure and trade and _hope_. It is a sweet taste of something she has not had in a very long time.

It is also a reminder.

“We’re nearly to the Tower,” the man named Biggs says, voice muffled slightly by the mask pulled taught around his face, and she is reminded of the mask over her own nose, leather digging into the skin around her scales. “There isn’t much else to see here, otherwise, but it’s something compared to, well...” He waves his arms around to the crystals jutting out around them, and then to the dying plant life by her feet.

She nods, following close with her shepherd’s cane in hand when he turns back around. The bell jingles lightly every now and then as she stumbles over unfamiliar landscape.

After a few bells, the Tower is finally in sight, piercing the skies even further than the spires that had covered the walls on their trek to here, and her companion races forwards to call to four figures standing at the ledge, looking off into the distance.

“Cid,” Biggs calls, and the white-haired man turns to face the two of them. “I brought the missus from camp to see it; she kept waving her cane at me when I said it’d be too dangerous, so…”

Biggs sheepishly rubs the back of his head, and she has to physically remind herself not to whack him in the back with her cane like she used to with her husband—he wouldn’t understand the unspoken _really now_ that came with it, anyhow.

Before Cid can speak, she thrusts her hand forward, a pendant with a glimmering indigo crystal in the palm of her hand. She knows he has seen it before; perhaps he has held it before. It matters not.

“I see,” Cid mumbles, and he looks like he thinks twice before continuing. “Are you certain? We’re not even sure if it’ll work, nor if they’ll be saved. Not the most well-thought out of plans, but if there’s even a sliver of hope…”

He turns, looking back towards the tower for a moment, and she wonders what could be so important about the Tower in the distance. What could have been so important that they left it alone until now?

“Of course I am,” she responds hoarsely, grasping the pendant tighter in her fist. The little lightning that arcs from it barely tickles her scales. “I have nothing else to lose.”

…

While Cid, Nero, and the remnants of what used to be Ironworks toil over the mechanics of opening the Tower’s doors, and then of what might be used to reverse the tides of Garlemald’s Black Rose, she finds herself falling unto old habits.

Namely, that of storytelling.

At first, it is solely for her own comfort; she lets swirls of smoke and ember come from her hands to make the Dawn Throne and Reunion, and sand for the people of her home. She doesn’t dare to use water—not when Silvertear Lake is polluted enough to make _her_ sick and the little water they do have to drink cannot be tainted at all costs—but as the stifling feeling of snuffed aether fades from Mor Dhona she finds she doesn’t need to be in her element anyways.

But then, when she hears a quiet wish from the bedside of Cid Garlond, she finds herself reaching for her cane anyways.

It takes little effort to weave together a quiet night in Rhalgr’s Reach with the Warriors of Light as pieced together by Cid, Nero, and Biggs; a gentle retreat, after a long week spent fighting some alien and a few mishaps with their engineered tea kettle.

The joy she brings to their faces, no matter how disguised, is enough for her to bring her spellweaving to the rest of their little resistance camp. 

She starts working more and more on her less whimsical spells when Nero, too, falls ill, hands shaking as he finishes up the last mathematical proofs required to successfully prove Cid’s theory possible, with the right materials. One for healing—she saves a lost moogle once, and they continuously wander back and forth from places to bring her more tales—and one for more selfish reasons.

Time. She needs time, if she is going to memorialize anyone, any _thing_ , and so she works until her left eye is milky white and the tips of her fingers are numb and she outlives her family even longer.

“There is a saying, among one of the tribes of my homeland,” she says, once, when asked why she would choose to live _longer_ in a place like this. By then, she has already learned the languages she would have once spurned—not all books and scriptures come in easy to read script, after all. “That the soul burns brightest when it has a goal—formerly battle, but I know of a few Dotharl that have dedicated themselves to honoring their names with other pursuits. Mine is merely storytelling, and if it takes devoting more time than I have to give to keep telling, then I will.”

She can tell they still have questions for her, perhaps about the gentle sadness that carries in her words, but they do not ask, and for that she is grateful.

After she pulls together a sight of the famed Operation Archon one night—with gratuitous help from the few scholars still residing in the camp, including a small Lalafellian lady with a buttery yellow coat—

Eventually—maybe it is after she weaves the ending of the Dragonsong War from Count Edmont de Fortemps and Lord Commander Aymeric de Borel’s final memoirs, or perhaps upon recreating the charge on Ala Mhigo as recorded by the descendants of Resistance Fighters, desperate to see what their mothers and fathers fought for when all they know is bleak futures—people come calling her things like _Hopekeeper_ and _Dreamweaver_ in lieu of the name she has yet to give. In time, people come from farther away to bring her stories; ones of hope and adventure, mostly, but once she receives a tattered journal from another Xaela, of a dark knight, and she tells only him the tales held inside as a reminder of what he still fights for.

A little Xaela child—she does not know whose child, but she knows that he is Oronir, by the golden highlights and the little sun pendant around his neck—comes to her after her fiftieth year and thanks her.

“What for?” She kneels down to his height.

“Everything,” he says, so earnest it feels like true sunshine. “My parents came here ‘cause of you, and then we found this place! And now I can listen to tales of heroes instead of, well, y’know. You’re hope’s storyteller!”

He bounces excitedly on his heels, and she can’t help but laugh so bright her lungs are aching afterwards.She is little more than a sister dreaming of her siblings, a century dead and lost to the winds, but she smiles every time someone calls her hope’s storyteller afterwards anyways.

…

It is on the turn of the second century after the clouds of Black Rose fell upon Eorzea that Cid Garlond’s wildest theories are finally brought to fruition. The doors of the Tower fall open while she is asleep, and it is back to night when Biggs and his small crew return from the Tower announcing their plan is now in its final stages; that of _creating_ the behemoth of an automaton that their founder theorized would make this all possible.

She seems to be the last one to meet the man of the hour, standing on the meager stage of haphazardly put together wood and nails so that she might create her stories around her, like a troupe making words come to life. His ears and tail are hidden under his robes, and he wrings his hands a bit nervously, but she can tell this man is much more important than he presents himself as, something bone-deep and aching as the memory of Cid’s bedside.

“Pray tell,” he starts, and everyone in the crowd turns to him. “Is there aught in your repertoire about the Warriors’ journey through that tower over yonder?” 

His smile is bright as she considers—perhaps for a bit too long, as it falters slightly when he pipes back up to say, “Forgive me for interrupting your, er, plans with my selfish request, but—”

“Nonsense,” she murmurs. “There is nothing too selfish here, and it happens that is a tale I’ve never told before.” She holds out her hand to the miqo’te, watching his ruby eyes flick up in surprise with his ears, even under the heavy woolen hood Biggs must have shoved him into before they’d left on their little pilgrimage. “Care to help me tell it, G’raha Tia?”

She holds out her hand to him, and the small yet eager crowd in front of her parts like the clouds to let him walk forward and take it.

…

G’raha’s hunger for knowledge spanning that two century long rest in that tower of his borders on _voracious_ ; even when Biggs says he can stop, that he knows enough to fill in the gaps, he manages to wheedle his way into more and more danger looking for it. There is an incident, when making their way back from Ishgard with what books and memoirs they can carry, and while numerous people fall Biggs and G’raha make it back barely alive.

She cannot rightfully say she is any less hungry than he, but she can tell his hunger is all-consuming, possessed. He gets out of his sick bed earlier than even she could recommend, and there is not a day that goes by that G’raha spends outside—not that anyone could blame him, seeing as all he knew is dead and the land continues to die around them, but she finds books piling high in his tent.

When even Biggs turns aside one night, evidently tired of trying to convince him that what he needs will not be found in books, she steps forward to grasp his arm before he can relight his candle.

“Are you going to try and stop me, too?” He looks up to her, and the desperation in his eyes flickers with the dying candlelight.

“No,” she answers, but instead of letting his hand reach for the matchbox again she sticks a scepter into his palm. It glimmers pale gold, the foci a bit dulled but still usable. “I am going to help you.”

G’raha looks indignant at that. “I do _not_ need—”

“If you want to die and never see a brighter future yourself, so be it. You may be devoted to this cause,” she says, quietly tightening her grip as he keeps resisting; he doesn’t seem to expect her strength. “But you will end up dead faster than them if you do not train.”

“I—” He starts, but he looks to the bandages covering his hands and then down to his lap.

It does not take much convincing after that.

…

There is precious few bells left before the Tycoon is set to make or break the future, and so she finds herself sprinting through camp with her journal held tight to her chest—the last one, because all the other tales and fables she had kept in her time have already been packed up and stored in the various rooms of the Crystal Tower, destined to bring hope to thousands of others.

(That is, if G’raha does not fail.)

Her feet carry her quickly across the uneven crystal leading to the Tower, and by the time the door is in sight she is panting madly, nearly tripping over her robes as she barrels into the main stairwell of the Tower.

Luckily, the man she was looking for is still here.

“My friend,” he says, ears flicked up in surprise. “What are you doing here!? The Tower is not a safe place for you to stay—”

“I have one last story to tell,” she admits, hand patting the heavy leather tome she holds to her chest. She’s still heaving, legs complaining, but it is nothing compared to the need to tell this one last tale. “A special one, at that. Would you care to listen?”

“Of course.” He sits haphazardly on one of the crates that are scattered about, and she walks—slower than usual, this time—to stand next to him. She sets the book by his side, the worn leather cover embossed and covered with vibrant paints, and it seems to catch his attention momentarily.

“My favorite memory,” she starts, aether coalescing slowly around her—she has grown weaker, in her two centuries of extended life, as the spell she’d uncovered could not save her from even the hallows of time, but it was enough for one more tale. Weaving the walls of her yurt are as simple as calling a burst of wind. “Has always been this, and I might think you’d find a bit of joy in it, too.”

It is a simple thing, to fill in the faces of these shades, frayed as her memory might be; the fuzzy pink lion had sat with his fairy next to the quiet elezen, sharing their plates as her own brother and sibling had sat opposite of them, quibbling over who would get their share of _khuushur_ first. Then, the miqo’te red mage that she personally had seen time and time again when she had barely been knee-height and shyer than a mouse, sat next to the solemn knight who had stared as she’d kicked the little lord from their yurt—a measure of privacy, and peace, for someone so intent on twisting the Naadam for his own purposes even at the request of the Mol was not one even she had wanted to share buuz with. The roegadyn warrior with chef’s hands was with little Och and Qara in the back, excitedly telling them stories with the two miqo’te men who had both declined a place at the fire, more than content to watch the stars in mostly-quiet company. And then…

G’raha gasps next to her, watching as she weaves strands of starlight and motes of Mor Dhona’s violet skies together at the final place set by the cooking pit. She is quiet, but the moonlight that filters through the open flaps of the yurt swathes her in a luminous glow, and her face is near picture perfect to when she had actually sat in her sort-of extended family’s yurt. 

“She was my sibling’s fifth ‘almost-sister’, as they put it.” She stifles a giggle in her sleeve, dusty as it is. The shades move around the two of them, false fire creating a sense of warmth. “Back home, in the Steppe, it is uncommon that outsiders are accepted into another’s yurt for supper, especially should _buuz_ be on the table. But my sibling…”

A flick of her hand has them a bit further in time, when she has offered her spellweaving talents to the menagerie of friends her sibling has gathered. 

“They did not trust easily, as I am sure you know,” she says, looking to G’raha and then to the images of the very tower they’d been preparing to send into the past for the last fortnight, formed in the embers of the cooking pit. “But the strength of this bond was worthy enough to share our mama’s specialty _buuz_ with.” She points to them, now laid back on the mats and rugs of the yurt, quietly failing to fight off sleep. “I did not recognize them when they returned, at first, but by supper’s end I was certain this was still the same Zaya that had flew west on the back of their yol.”

She smiles when the memory skips to later, when the moon is high and every adventurer has fallen asleep haphazardly on the floor of the tent. “Happy as they may be on grand adventures,” she whispers, letting the strands of hope fray and unravel as her magic fades. “I have not seen them any more at peace than this moment.”

The memory ends quietly, in a burst of sunlight and moonglow, and as the motes of aether fizzle back into transparency G’raha slides off of the crate. He stays silent, for a few moments, still transfixed onto that one spot where his dearest ‘friend’, as Zaya had once put it, sat.

Only when she softly clears her throat does he turn to look her in the eyes, ruby eyes wild and hair just the slightest bit disheveled. He looks both terrible and determined at the same time, and she cannot decide whether she sees Zaya’s spirit or Oktai’s determination in his soul first.

“I…” he starts, eyes looking back down to his feet, wringing his hands like he did when she first met him. “I would ask your name, but I feel it would be improper to only do introductions when I am about to leave.”

Her quiet huff of laughter has his head snapping back up fast enough for her to hear the light crack of his neck. “Taban Qestir,” she says, bowing slightly. “Famed storyteller and well past her years.”

G’raha almost seems to puff up. “I—Is there anything—”

“No.” She has taught him all she could, all her stories told and her promises filled. After two centuries of outliving one’s family, she thinks there is nothing more she needs than to rest. “I’ve taken enough of your time, I would think.” 

It’s harder than she thought it would be to press the leather-bound journal from her first few years into his hands, knowing that all she remembers of her home is written into its pages, but she does it anyways. “Go on now, G’raha Tia. Your destiny awaits.” 

She smiles, then, just as mirthful as their sibling’s own smile, back when they were sitting around that cooking pit sharing their home and food with friends rather than a grave with them.

And as he turns to retreat further into the Tower that both robbed him of his future and can give him one anew, Taban thinks of Zaya, brilliant and bright and effervescent, and of their friends, their figures not as filled out in Taban’s memory than of them but just as lovely and bright all the same.

She remembers as she walks out of the Crystal Tower, and hopes that G’raha will remember his friends first before the vaunted heroes of the world he woke to.


	3. call of the sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #2: sway
> 
> .
> 
> set post 5.3, but no explicit spoilers!

_“Jaaaacke,”_ V’kebbe calls from the doorframe of the Sisters. “There’s a cat at the end o’ our dock caterwaulin’; ‘s drivin’ the colts mad.”

Jacke, for lack of his usual penchant to roll along to V’kebbe’s schemes, scoffs. Between Rhela, her axe, and Heart being called back up to Ghimlyt Dark and the brewing storm calling all the pirate crews back to shore, his hands have been carefully tangled up in all the trails he needs to keep an eye or five on. “Are ye sayin’ ye can’t handle a _cat_ , Stray?”

“Sure I can, but the colts,” she drawls, and Jacke can imagine her dramatically waving her arms about without even looking away from his newest report. “they like t’ hop the twig if Perimu loses focus, an’ I was meant t’ grabble a pair o’ knives from Naldiq an’ Vymelli’s, so I whiddled…”

 _“V’kebbe,_ it takes hardly a secon’ t’ scare off a beastie with yer stabbers. Jus’ kick a barrel at it or summat ‘fore ye go.”

Instead of a mumbled insult or groan, however, all Jacke hears after that is a giggle. Strange.

“Look,” she says after a few beats of silence, and her tone borders on something curious with how it lilts over the distant clash of metal. “Did ye want me t’ teach or t’ scare off our _damber cove_ for his _terrible_ singin’ voice?”

Jacke looks up to her with a raised eyebrow, finally curious enough. V’kebbe waggles her eyebrows suggestively in return.

Damn. Since when was he this easily swayed by V’kebbe, much less _him?_

“Fine, fine,” he says, shoving his chair away from the table. “Ye benar not be lyin’ or yer on teachin’ duties fer the rest o’ the moon.”

“An’ ye’d think I’d lie o’er this? I’m utterly _shocked—”_

Jacke pushes his way past V’kebbe in the doorframe before they inevitably start squabbling over who lies more often and over _what_ ridiculous thing, taking care not to smash her tail with the hinges of the door like Perimu did a fortnight ago.

He does, however, raise a hand to her head just to muss up her bandana as he goes, because even if Tehra’ir’s voice can and will break glass should he continue, she _could have_ just cut to the point!

It’s just a brisk walk out from the guildhall when Jacke catches the first slightly-less-scratchy-than-before note of singing coming from the direction of the _Astalicia’s_ mooring point, and he quickens his pace as Lonwoerd quietly waves to him. At least his singing is buggering the brigands and pirates likely sleeping on the ship, Jacke thinks quietly as he hums the sailor’s song Tehra’ir is failing to capture properly. It’s not exactly territory he should be wandering into leisurely, but he’d bet a whole year’s worth of blunt that they would know better than to mess with a Warrior of Light, much less a rogue.

He can see why Tehra’ir would linger outside tonight, though; the summer heat had, for the most part, already boiled off, bringing the cool sea breeze closer to shore with the rising tides, and the lion’s share of the daily riff raff had either gone to bed or vacated to the Wench with the intent of drinking themselves to sleep.

And, he thinks, chuckling to himself, leave it to a Keeper of the Moon to stay outside well past what’s good for an adventurer in Limsa, light of the full moon glimmering over the dark seas and all.

“Ho there,” he calls when he come close enough to see silver at the end of the dock, and the quick twitch of Tehra’ir’s tail is all the invitation he needs to keep walking towards the man, staring out at sea. The lights of the _Astalicia_ catch on the blade of his daggers, still strapped to his side, and the light blue tips of his hair nearly turn sterling silver under it. “Didn’ think ye’d be back so soon, after yer last missive.”

Even though he’s turned away from Jacke, his grin seeps enough into his words that Jacke can almost see it, fangs and all. “Finally managed t’ catch yer attention, did I?”

“Not quite,” Jacke admits, clambering carefully onto the crates next to Tehra’ir’s decided perch of a _barrel_ . He elects to haphazardly seat himself on the second crate up rather than right next to the miqo’te, leaning forward to see him better. “Sent the Stray an’ Underfoot t’ train some colts, an’ a bell later V’kebbe comes complainin’ of a ‘caterwaulin’ cat’ at the end o’ our docks. Thought it a rummy tale, first—” Jacke leans forward a bit more to lightly tug Tehra’ir’s bandana over his eyes. “—then remembered just how much ye tried t’ fob off the idea that ye were a _siren_ when really ye—”

“Stubble it, I was _not_ that bad! An’ ‘twas _Underfoot_ that started the rummy tale, anyways!”

Tehra’ir exaggeratedly fusses with his bandana, and when his eyes are freed of the cloth he turns to give Jacke a fond glare and a swipe at his crate in return. It doesn’t do much but make Jacke kick up his leg to avoid a good bruise on the side of his calf, but he can appreciate the effort.

“Anyroad, V’kebbe pulled me from me pile of papers,” Jacke continues when Tehra’ir is finished fussing with his bandana, ears flicking to make sure the thing’s on proper. “an’ now I be here, prattlin’ with you. Did ye plan on comin’ into the Guild anytime soon?”

Tehra’ir hops off his barrel, landing firmly back on the docks as the barrel sways back and forth from the sudden loss of weight holding it still. “Nah—Wyda’s here with me; Scions say I still need more bed rest, but ye never saw me here, deal?”

“‘Course,” Jacke says, eyes following Tehra’ir as he walks slowly back down the way of the docks towards Fisherman’s Bottom, taking note of how he wobbles back and forth slightly like a druken sailor, tail lashing with him to keep him balanced. “How far are ye into the cups?” He carefully leaps back down onto the docks, just the smallest bit enchanted by the gentle _swish-swish_ of Tehra’ir’s tail as he slows to turn on his heels.

“Not at all,” Tehra’ir answers, voice crisp, clear, and _measured_ . “Or _very_ , dependin’ on what pleases ye, cap’n.”

Jacke raises an eyebrow as he catches up to his fellow rogue.

“Don’t be _daft,_ love,” he says, cheekily flicking at one of Tehra’ir’s ears just to see it bounce back, albeit leaving a jokingly stern look now plastered to Tehra’ir’s face. “Ye please me as is.”

Tehra’ir huffs, tension draining from his shoulders. “Bene; was ‘fraid I was goin’ to need bingo from the Wench after this.” 

He lightly pushes himself up onto the tips of his feet to kiss just below Jacke’s temple, and Jacke quietly wonders where he could have gotten _that_ information, to know where would be best to gently pepper affection. When he bounces back onto his heels, he almost tips too far backwards, so Jacke grabs his wrist and tugs him back until he’s standing properly.

“An’ who said ye couldn’t have yerself a drink if it did go well?” He nudges Tehra’ir’s ribs with his elbow, wincing slightly when he hits his ribs harder than he’d expected. “ ‘Sides, I whiddle ye need to yaffle a bite, anyroad; nearly one o’ those skeletons off on the Isles o’ Umbra.”

“Yer still as bony as always,” he grumbles in response as he wriggles his hand into Jacke’s. When Jacke chances to look back up, Tehra’ir’s eyes shimmer like the sea off Costa del Sol at sunset, and Jacke has never wondered if the entirety of the sea at its finest could be rivaled by a person like all of those bawdy sailor’s tales until now. “Since yer here, care t’ make it a date at the Wench? Ye owe me a few victory drinks an’ suppers, if I recall.”

Jacke laughs. Leave it to Tehra’ir to remember all the bets he’s lost a free meal to, and not to remember that the Wench is both crowded _and_ the opposite of romantic.

“Are ye _sure_ Zaya’s taste fer any and all food hasn’t rubbed off on ye? The Wench ain’t fine dinin’, an’ as far as I know the Bismarck’s still servin ‘til three bells past.”

Tehra’ir blushes, then, an unusual red compared to his usually pale complexion, and his tail whips around into his hands so he can fidget with the fur standing up at the ends. “I… lost track of time? Thought the Bismarck'd be closed by now...”

Jacke starts laughing harder at that, but he gently sways closer into Tehra’ir’s space before he calms down and says, “Don't matter much to me, anyroad, so long as it's edible an' won't get me strung up, so aye, I'll dine with ye. Always, love.”


	4. til the dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #3: muster
> 
> .
> 
> set post 5.3, spoilers ahead!

“Bluebird,” Thancred murmurs, nudging his shoulder where Zaya has decided he’d make a wonderful midday pillow. All he receives in return is a half-hearted grumble and Zaya resting their hand that isn’t already on his lap atop his arm to keep him from jostling them any further. “You can’t nap here.”

“Who  _ says," _ Zaya mumbles good-naturedly into his shirt. “I c’n do what I wanna.”

Despite himself, the corners of Thancred’s mouth tilt upwards into a light smile in face of Zaya’s ever lovely disregard for Eorzean social standards. “I’m afraid we  _ did _ agree to refrain from being overly… shall we settle with lovey-dovey and clingy in public, hm?”

That seems to bug Zaya enough that they crack open one of their eyes blearily, eyebrow tilted in, presumably, confusion. “You call th’s  _ public?” _

Thancred huffs, because being stuck in an infirmary with a dozen or so of your friends doesn’t exactly qualify for  _ private _ either, but he cautiously casts his gaze around the room anyways. Tehra’ir and Lumelle are sat closer to the door, both fully dedicated to their little arm-wrestling contest—which, to Thancred’s complete  _ shock _ Lumelle is winning and Tehra’ir is struggling not to cheat and use his other hand by how his hand was twitching in his lap. He hears Syhrwyda, sat with A’dewah and Duscha on the other side of the curtains conversing excitedly about some theorem or another, and then catches the tops of Valdis’ ears closer to the shelves in the back where Krile and Alphinaud have been desperately trying to placate Alisaie, who was not pleased with being unable to  _ train. _

When his cursory scan leaves him looking at Urianger and Y’shtola sitting on the edges of their cots calmly playing chess and sipping tea, Thancred sighs. He suspected his fellow Scions already knew full well of their relationship—apparently even the earliest stages of his infatuation were as subtle as a fireworks show ten fulms away from their noses—but Thancred  _ had _ expected to struggle in passing muster under F’lhaminn’s eye, or Krile’s, even, when it came to his newest love. Considering his not-so-reputable history in flirting with anyone even mildly attractive regardless of gender, he’d expected at  _ least _ a concerned glare or twelve.

...Hells, Tataru hadn’t even  _ blinked _ when Zaya had walked straight past her and collapsed onto his shoulder like they belonged there.

Perhaps he really was overthinking it.

He had opened his mouth to (sulkily) admit to Zaya that, yes, this was not public and yes, he’d probably manage even if one of their fellows caught him being a little less professional than usual, especially considering his current state as  _ invalid _ , according to Krile, but was promptly interrupted by Y’shtola clearing her throat with a sharp  _ click _ of her teacup onto its saucer.

“Are you truly denying both you and your paramour a nap for fear of embarrassing yourself?” A wry smile graces Y’shtola’s face, her eyes glimmering lightly with teasing joy in the candlelight as if she’d never gone blind at all. If she had been standing, her hands would have been on her hips, Thancred is certain. “Really now, Thancred. All present here have witnessed flirtations and affectations from you far worse than what Zaya asks.”

“I—!” Thancred sputters, bowing his head to keep the light flush on his face from egging Y’shtola into, perhaps, the same sort of teasing Urianger had subjected him to during the final celebration of the night’s return. 

Urianger’s light chuckle nearly has him whipping his head back up to glare at the astrologian, though. “Shouldst thou retain any doubts of thine improvement in matters of thy heart, it wouldst be mine pleasure to recount thy past once more—”

_ “Thank you, _ Urianger, but I sincerely doubt anyone here needs nor desires a recounting of my past escapades, much less the man at the center of it all!” Thancred nearly slumps in a huff as Urianger and Y’shtola fall into hearty laughs—a good sign to their recovery, if at his expense. Gods, escape one embarrassment just to fall face first into the next… though, that wasn’t to say it was untrue. Thinking back on it now, he was an utter  _ menace. _

His attention gets drawn back to Zaya’s slow fall into unconsciousness when their tail curls its way round his thigh, another fond touch next to the gentle grip on his arm as cool scales and bumps run against the underside of his arm. It was always a shock of levin, the gentle love pressed into their hands when they held him like something to be cherished when Thancred had witnessed first-hand how their knuckles could crackle with volts higher than any thunderstorm. He had feared what was behind all of their little touches, at first; what else could be more cloyingly sweet than touch, just as beautiful and volatile as lightning? How could he trust something so inconstant, muster the courage to let it surround him?

(What a wonder, he thinks as they rub the bit of their cheek covered in scales onto his shoulder comfortingly, that Zaya had still somehow found the good in him to fall for all those years ago.)

“...Fine. Let’s get your armor off, then; I’ve already your tail and horns to contend with, and I’d rather not be in bed with any more of a potential hazard,” Thancred says as he reaches for the pauldron covering Zaya’s left shoulder. It’s not like he’s got anywhere better to be, not with Krile demanding he rest lest he wear himself out. “Love, you awake enough to manage your boots and gloves?”

“Boots… not gl’ves?”

Thancred hums in response, letting the pauldron drop onto the bedsheets and the detached sleeve on Zaya’s left arm sag down without its tie to hold it in place. “Let me see your arms.”

He lets his fingertips linger while he undos the knots and ties lining the insides of Zaya’s gauntlets, lightly tugging the leather gloves underneath the metal plating off as they shrug off the smaller of their boots and lean down to fuss with the leg guard on their left. If they notice him idly tracing hearts like some sort of lovesick ditz onto the rough of their scales once he’s finished fumbling about with their gloves, they don’t mention it as they finally kick off their other boot, leg guard and all, to fully crash onto him.

“Gods be good, hold  _ on,” _ Thancred says as he reaches up to take the corsage of forget-me-nots out from their crown braid, trying his damnedest not to catch the little brightgold additions on the tip of Zaya’s horn while they shift about.

He turns to set the corsage on the bedside table—giving Y’shtola a half-hearted glare when he catches her smirk from underneath her fingers—and when he turns back Zaya has already shuffled across the cot to lie down, having left a good deal of space for him to claim for himself. How thoughtful, for a rampant blanket thief.

“Urianger,” Thancred calls as he settles on his side, pulling Zaya closer to his shoulder. He’ll likely have blue facepaint smeared all over the nape of his neck when he wakes—the only thing stopping him from sitting back up and casting about for a tissue or handkerchief of some sort is the low trill Zaya makes when he brushes their newly-cut bangs from their eyes. “If you dare bring this up to Tataru, I  _ will _ find a way to steal every sweet Rjoli will ever make for you, mark my words.” 

He doesn’t quite mean it—Rjoli would likely turn him into a leafman for the highest offense of sweet-filching, and for his introversion Urianger is  _ surprisingly _ good at playing pranks—but the laugh that drowsily bubbles forth from Zaya’s lips as both of them settle into sleep is worth the trouble of risking retribution anyways.


	5. touch of death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #4: clinch
> 
> .
> 
> spoilers for SHB MSQ "The Oracle of Light" duty

Thancred had expected to arrive, perhaps, just in the nick of time—the Exarch would not have been so reckless with the Crystarium’s troops had he no true way to counter their general, even for the Oracle and even with the newfound hope that came with night, and Thancred had long suspected the Exarch’s game to be the summoning of _all_ their Warrior friends anyhow—and in a way he _had,_ catching Ran’jit’s foot on his gunblade before it came crashing down on the horn of sole fighter standing.

Zaya, just as brilliant and blue and alive as he’d remembered, was behind him, attempting to turn Ran’jit’s somewhat draconic companion into a pretzel, or perhaps a knot. He hadn’t caught enough of their wrangling to tell which way Gukumatz had been twisted.

“Fancy that, a proper pugilist showdown between the two best I know,” he snarks, watching Ran’jit’s face turn to deeper disgust as Zaya barks a laugh. “Shame I’ve chosen to interrupt.”

Just outside of their arena, marked by lightning burns all around ending hardly ten yalms away from him, he sees Minfilia—thank the gods she’s alive, though her arms and dress are marked with burns—alongside several of their wayward crew, battered and a bit startled, considering that static is still arcing from Alisaie’s pauldrons.

“Take Ran’jit,” Zaya grumbles as Thancred is forced a step back by Ran’jit pressing down harder, pushing into their shoulders through their armor. Gukumatz’s tail lashes once into the side of his stomach, thankfully against his armor, but it does little to keep the light lightning-touched feeling of Zaya’s aura from smothering him. “I’ll keep th’ snake-thing busy?”

Thancred looks up quickly at the crumbling walls of Laxan Loft, near to the sun, and catches the robes of a familiar figure rushing past his soldiers to a better vantage point. Crystal refracting shards of rainbow glow in the light, the rough edges of his hand curled around an Allagan cube of sorts—he’d need time, Thancred thinks; something delayed the Exarch’s arrival, or perhaps quickened his own.

Well, so long as Zaya’s willing to keep fighting. “At your ready!”

The sharp scent of levin fills his lungs as Zaya changes stances, and at their tail flicking against the back of his knee he tilts his blade just so, leaving Ran’jit’s foot little purchase save to slam into the dirt—even then, Thancred hardly had the time to swing his blade back, widen his stance and secure his footing as Ran’jit recovered with a roundhouse kick aimed for the old injury he’d inflicted on Thancred’s shoulder, the last they met in combat—back when he’d been escaping from Eulmore, Minfilia in tow, cornered by him after the damned _chimera_ of a sin eater, lion with wings and all.

Thancred raises his blade to block after a single attempt to slice into Ran’jit’s arm leaves his head too open—right, no helmet with damned horns this time to make his skull less of a choice—catching the metal-soled heel of Ran’jit’s shoe on the sharp of his gunblade.

(Ran’jit’s style has always been closer to savate than Zaya’s mixed martial, heavy kicks aimed straight at his head filling the space where Thancred would usually have needed to step aside to avoid knuckles in his solar plexus; nothing more than raw strength hide behind his blows, either—the first time Thancred fought the man he’d been prepared for _more,_ for lightning and fire to sear against the skin of his arms, for an unexpected burst of aether to send him reeling and found himself sorely disappointed, somehow, when it hadn’t compared the same to Zaya.

At least one thing remained the same, between the two styles—as always, it only takes a minor mistake for the tides to turn; a single opening, a single touch let slip past his defenses, and he’d find himself back on the defensive, or worse—)

His blade slips off of Ran’jit’s foot a second too soon, too far to leap back into Zaya’s vicinity from where they’ve moved, giving him space to fight but not to defend, and too close to Minfilia and the others. It is only him, Ran’jit, and the selfsame motion he’d made with his hand when a great bolt of lightning slammed down into Zaya while Thancred approached—even if it did hardly anything to them, there was no question that it could take down any other.

 _Damn, damn, damn!_ He braces himself as Ran’jit’s open palm slams into his breastplate, lightning crackling through his bones, through _him_ and the air behind him, but even digging his heels in isn’t enough to keep himself from being pushed away—sent flying, even, with how his interruption _clearly_ irked the man enough to fuel his strength. Thancred reels, tasting levin and iron on his tongue. His gunblade is planted in the ground just in front of him, a trail from where he’d first planted it into the dirt leading to where he sits now. He brings his hand to rub at his eyes, and his vision clears just in time for him to see Ran’jit taking advantage of Zaya’s split-second of distraction to rail his knee into their stomach hard enough to send them tumbling into Alisaie.

_Fantastic._

Head spinning and lungs sputtering, he distantly hopes Alisaie didn’t get smacked across the head with Zaya’s tail, and finds it in himself to be _glad_ that Zaya had not kept wearing their metal gauntlets and boots, even if he disliked the notion of them freezing their knuckles over as a replacement.

“Hmph. Know your folly,” Ran’jit barks as he steps closer to Alphinaud, muttering something under his breath that Thancred can’t quite catch under the ringing of his ears.

What Thancred does catch, though, is the glint of rainbow light through crystal, and the distant gleam of gold polished enough to catch sunlight. Against the glare of the sun, he finds a silhouette looking down at them and their little predicament, hooded, shaded heavily by the light, yet somehow still more heroic than Thancred seems to have been.

 _Just in the nick of time,_ he thinks as he gathers himself enough to pull up to his knees, leaning on his gunblade as Allagan circles form around all of them.

Ran’jit’s expression of shocked realization just before the Exarch spirits them away from Laxan Loft leaves a taunting smirk on Thancred’s face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is tribute to the (very old) retired monk DoT, which i don't remember when it was removed anymore but i remember using it back during like, 2.4 patch cycle. squeenix this is my demand, bring touch of death back--


	6. sentimental fallacy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #5: matter of fact
> 
> .
> 
> post-qitana ravel! **CW: animal death + blood (zaya's hunting)**

With the Lightwarden of Rak’tika vanquished and subsequently absorbed into the aether of one of the seven heroes—Emet-Selch has not been bothered to keep track, nor informed of who has absorbed what aether by the Scions—the Greatwood’s evening sunlight was bearable, motes of dust lit by the shards of sunlight that filtered through the canopy. He’d made a point to walk past the lake, quietly watching it glimmer with the newly-returned sunset in emeralds and teals; somewhere along the way of restoring the night it seemed the creatures that wandered about had also quieted. The ones he did manage to find along his stroll were either starving, or—

An arrow whizzes past his face, sinking into the skull of the doe he’d been approaching, and Emet-Selch lets out a great sigh. The arrow in question is gold-tipped and fletched with feathers of those yols from the Source.

“Have you no restraint, hero?” He turns on the balls of his feet as the doe collapses unceremoniously and finds just the Warrior he’d been expecting. “That was quite close to finding its mark in my  _ skull.” _

Zaya leaps down from a nearby tree, verdant leaves and branches sticking out here and there in their hair, and stows away their vibrant blue bow in favor of a hunting knife—pointedly ignoring him, he notes, as they set about carving their mark. The white leather of their gloves stains red as he watches them almost haphazardly cut organs away from meat. Rather ghastly, if he were to comment.

He attempts to take a step forward, closer to this shade’s space, only to receive a sharp whip of their tail against his ankle.

“Rude. Perhaps I was simply trying to look closer.” They glare up at him, vibrant iolite eyes just a shade or so away from true sapphire; knocked off course by the ice blue of their limbal rings, perhaps.

He doesn’t expect them to drop the knife onto a piece of cloth—also carrying the meat they’d carved away, he notices—and pull their hands together.

_ “Maybe you should not have been there,” _ Zaya signs at him, in a particularly snarky way—if one could call sharper motions ‘snarky’, he supposes. The crimson blood drips from their fingers as they motion.  _ “Besides, you could have teleported yourself away. Or the arrow. You were not in danger.” _

Emet-Selch scoffs. “Of course I could. I had simply wanted to make a  _ point _ that perhaps your aim will not be so ‘perfect’ next time.

_ “I—what,” _ they sign, pausing to squint at him, more scrutiny than anger. Their facepaint has red splotches in it now, he notices; a stark contrast from the blue they so love to surround themselves in.  _ “Are you saying you do not trust my aim?” _

(“Hah!” Atalanta scoffs, twirling the arrow round and round between their fingers as Hades struggles not to toss back the arrow in his own hand back at them. They’d come less than  _ inches _ from sinking their arrow into his heart, barely piercing the board behind him that he’d only walked in front of to retrieve his earring. “What, do you not trust my aim?”

He huffs, and says—)

“Should I?” He asks back, crossing his arms as he attempts not to twitch unnecessarily. “ ‘Tis hardly a challenge to shoot doe of this size.”

_ “It is a challenge not to throw this knife at you,” _ they sign back matter-of-factly, and he has the propriety to falsely gasp. How utterly  _ threatening _ a knife was to his being if he could simply teleport away.

“And here I thought I was your ally.”

Zaya shoots up from their squat, at that, holding their makeshift sack of doe meat between sticky crimson fingers, taupe skin stained—when he looks back to their face, the wrinkle of their nose and night-stained scales is almost,  _ almost _ something he wants to turn away from. Not out of disgust, no, but of the strange longing in his chest to pat their head, or something of the sort. Like a little coeurl playing at the title of hunter his student had held long ago.

“Y’u did something to my friends,” they hiss, and he is nearly stunned by their sudden propensity towards speech over their favored sign. “Y’u do not get  _ trust _ until I know where they are.”

(“What did you do with them?!” Atalanta shrieks, aether crackling between their fingers with masks spread out on the table. Their eyes are filled with lightning, crackling under the glossy pearlescent film that has always been present even with their sapphire irises.

“It was not  _ my _ doing, Atalanta,” he says, soothing, like trying to coax a panther sent into a rage back into something tame. “They simply responded to the call of the Convocation—”

There is a crack of thunder—whether there is an actual storm outside or simply Atalanta’s undeniable loss of control over their own temper, Hades does not know—and Atalanta slams their palms into the table.

“A Convocation you are a  _ part of! _ Do your own morals not apply anymore!?”)

“As I have said before,  _ hero,” _ he drawls, shifting his weight from one leg to another, ignoring the weight of the crystal necklaces hanging from one half of his robe and how they clatter against each other. “I have no clue as to where they might be.”

Gleaming sunlight poured through the canopy onto Zaya’s face, light reflecting off the metal rings on the ends of their horns. The verdant leaves hanging from their hair—olive leaves, he noted—fell into the puddle of blood by their feet, the light  _ splash _ breaking Zaya’s intense stare as they turned heel and walked off towards Slitherbough, arrow forgotten.


	7. for you the flowers bloom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #6: free day! | vernalization
> 
> .
> 
> post 5.3, spoilers for the last (scion related) cutscene!

The dawn on the day Krile let A’dewah more than five steps out of the Dawn’s Respite came with a steady peace, Revenant’s Toll not yet awake to greet the rising sun in its unfiltered brilliance. Mor Dhona’s usual smog of corrupted aether hadn’t come back in nearly a week, now, and the air had been all the better for it, a summer breeze sweet on the horizon as A’dewah had taken in the emptiness of the Toll. He’d even made it all the way to the rooftop garden before his quiet view of the Singing Shards, glimmering like Zaya’s aquamarines in the daybreak, was interrupted—and not even by someone finding him.

In the pocket of the coat Lunya and Syhrwyda had practically smothered him in when he’d asked to step out of the Rising Stones, the light ring of a linkpearl catches his attention, singing of river water and spring. Warmth, among the morning chill, overly familiar.

His heart leaps into his throat. No, it couldn’t be, he’d forgot the linkpearl somewhere in Sweetsieve when he’d caught wind of Thancred’s collapse—

When he finally fishes the linkpearl from his pocket to find the same earring he’d resigned himself to never seeing again, A’dewah makes a mental note to thank Lunya when he has the chance to; she must have found it in her final journey across Norvrandt, G’raha in tow… sort of.

Either way, it’s simply another debt he figures he owes to her.

He scrambles to thumb the connection on, nearly fumbling and dropping the earring off the side of the Stones when his fingers stiffen and lock, barely lucky enough for the pearl to simply drop into the palm of his hand instead of down three flights of stairs.

“Hey,” Haruki’s voice rings clear—clearer than it did all the way from the First, at any rate—almost muted in comparison to his usual cheery tone, exhaustion seeping in where Dewah would usually find a refreshing Rustling leaves fill the quiet lull between his words, “Hope it’s not too early, where you are?”

He huffs; since that one call back in the Pendants, he hadn’t stayed up  _ that _ early, and he wasn’t about to break that streak while he was still recovering, the dull, empty ache of missing aether enough to keep him bedridden most of the time. 

“Isn’t it later than you usually call in Doma?” Dewah tries to do the math in his head, but Haruki’s almost loopy  _ shhh _ is enough for him to get his answer. “I mean… not too early? The sun’s still rising over Mor Dhona.”

_ That _ seems to wake Haruki up enough, a second wind to his voice as he excitedly asks dozens of questions _ —when did you get back, how are you feeling, did Hanami manage to get that tailfeather from Suzaku to you— _ and he tends to the garden while he talks; somehow, he gets from their newest Scions’ return (“L-look, it’s not—! G’raha still has  _ his archer muscles,  _ you know I get flustered!” “Mmm, maybe  _ I’ll _ pick up archery…”  _ “Please don’t for my own sanity’s sake.” _ ) to the rumors of a shark infestation at Costa del Sol having something to do with this year’s Moonfire Faire while Haruki drowsily comments here and there.

“Dewah,” Haruki mumbles, after Dewah’s finished recounting just how horrified Duscha and Syhrwyda were when Tataru came in with that odd-smelling bread, and he can faintly hear a muffled yawn. “When d’you think you’ll come back home and visit? I wanna—” Haruki pauses, and Dewah can hardly hear the groan he makes when he stretches over the thrum of his own damned heartbeat. “—wanna hold you again. Miss seeing you flustered.”

For a moment, Dewah’s heart stays stuck in his throat, somehow still unused to being wanted so earnestly even by Haruki, who would want probably want him to come  _ home _ even if he’d didn’t come out all the same after the events on the First. Who had been so happy to see A’dewah in the House of the Fierce after years of nothing, even as horribly bent out of shape as he was over the stress of coming back to Yanxia with all of his allies’ eyes on him; who had been there when he’d been at his worst, who had loved him even when he had chosen to keep him an arm’s length away—

“Soon,” A’dewah promises, even while he thinks of how his aether had weakened from returning the part of his soul that, apparently, was Zaya’s, and of how he’d been destabilizing at around the same rate as Thancred had despite being called around the time of Urianger and Y’shtola. His free hand brushes over the petals of an iris, just about ready to bloom. “And this time, I  _ won’t _ run away out of the blue.”

Haruki stifles a laugh—in his pillow, or sleeve, probably; A’dewah can hear fabric rustling about on Haruki’s end. “Yeah, because you’ll, hopefully, be stuck in a hug for as long as I can manage.”

A’dewah’s following laugh, echoing off the walls of the Rising Stones, is the first sound that brings Revenant’s Toll to life as dawn gives way to another bright day.

…

Two weeks after, A’dewah makes a  _ very  _ inadvisable choice for the sake of his heart.

After scarfing down about two and a half slices of Archon loaf—ew, gods, how did the other Scions eat this in Sharlayan daily, is this why Syhrwyda is so adamant about her cooking, is this why Duscha fed his slice of loaf the other day to Miloh—he practically wheedles Krile into letting him teleport, briefly peeking into the infirmary to grab his satchel and is almost out of the Rising Stones when—

“A’dewah Tia,” Hanami says, her voice sending chills down A’dewah’s back even though it  _ really _ shouldn’t, by this point in time. “Where are you going.”

“A-ah, well…” He stammers, hands reaching to fiddle with the leather strap of his bag even as he (somehow) keeps his head held high, a bubbling nervousness in the pit of his stomach even though he finds no reason to feel ashamed. 

There is no reason to lie, either, he thinks, even if it will send her on his trail eventually, when Krile realizes what he has done for love.

“Home.”

He turns tail the moment Hanami’s brow furrows—he might have a burst of bravery, but there is  _ no way _ he can handle her coldfire stare—already two steps out the door when he hears an almost exasperated sigh from Hanami—but no footsteps following after him, thank the Matron for that. A’dewah might really have fainted, then, regardless of the ether Krile made him drink earlier.

When he finally steps up to the aetheryte, it’s easier than ever to find the tailwind that leads him home and let it sweep him away.

…

The Doman Enclave is nearly the same as he remembers it, if not more festive; perhaps for a hanabi festival, considering the bright lanterns and stalls lining the streets that A’dewah did not remember being there before, vendors carrying crates of vibrant goods and patterned fabrics. He passes by Alianne, giving a light greeting before practically stumbling away to prevent her asking after his health, and then several of the children from the Doman Adventurer’s Guild rush past him, paper lanterns in hand and excitedly chattering.

He’s not sure he’s ever seen the Enclave more alive than now.

In his daze, he nearly runs into two Au’ra—both much shorter than him, even compared to Hanami or Zaya—and he nearly brushes it off with a quick apology before he catches just who he’d bumped into next.

“K-Kotone!?” He sputters; even though he’d known he’d be coming back to Doma he hadn’t  _ quite _ expected her to be around, a loss of words for why he might be here, so soon after arriving home from the First. Honoka levels him with a sharpened glare—presumably relating to the origami knife (of which he’d nearly given himself a  _ very _ large papercut on the edge of) he’d received from the post moogle after the entire debacle with G’raha’s new appearance and A’dewah’s  _ very _ unwanted reaction—but Kotone’s shy smile never falters as she urges her sister to continue walking. For a moment, he expects some sort of verbal flaying, so uncharacteristic of his fellow wallflower, but why  _ else _ would she make Honoka go before her—

But instead of asking anything of him, of  _ why did you leave so quickly so long ago _ or  _ did you know you nearly broke his heart _ she simply looks over her shoulder to the One Garden, letting Dewah’s gaze follow to a flash of teal walking past, bright in the afternoon sun.

“The morning glories you brought us,” she says, her voice a quiet autumn wind. “He’s taken to caring for them, when he can.”

_ Thank you, _ he mouths as Kotone smiles sweetly at him, walking briskly to catch up to her sister as he almost sprints to the One Garden before rethinking himself and merely speed walking instead. His heart beats in time with his steps, singing with anticipation as he turns the corner and sees that familiar, horrible peacock teal.

(He’d heard from thinly veiled conversations, back before he was taken away to the First on accident, about how Haruki had stopped keeping up with his usually strenuous ritual of horribly bright hair dye after he’d left; he remembers just how guilty he’d felt, and how scared he was of ever showing his face back in the Doman Enclave afterwards. He’d been so adamant on not even letting his roots show for a week, so for it to be noticable….)

A light tap on Haruki’s shoulder has him curiously turning around, though, breaking his gentle but distant stare into the garden pond. “Hi,” A’dewah says like he hasn’t just shown up after a good year and at  _ least _ two tall tales worth of adventures, smiling when Haruki’s expression shifts to that of shock, then of barely concealed joy. 

“Hey,” Haruki replies, failing to swallow his smile before it brightens into a grin that Dewah never wants to see fall again. “Didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”

“I teleported here as soon as Krile cleared me to teleport—to  _ Limsa Lominsa,” _ he confesses, bringing a hand up and scratching nervously at the back of his neck. Not the most well-thought out of his plans, now that he thinks about it. “B-but I think Hanami is going to be coming after me soon; she caught me leaving and if Krile asks she’ll probably, er, rat me out, and they’ll probably drag me back to get an earful—”

“But you’re here  _ now. _ I think,” he says, reaching his hand out to gently brush at A’dewah’s torn ear, touch just soft and familiar enough that he snaps out of his worrying with ease. “that matters more than Hana-chan probably coming to kick your ass.” A’dewah snickers; he’s probably right, anyhow, and just  _ maybe _ if Hanami does come knocking he can gently toss Haruki under the bus for how he refuses to call Hanami anything else but the nickname she hates when talking to him.

Haruki walks over to the railing of the bridge, after a moment, and pats the railing next to him; a seat so that Dewah isn’t craning his neck up all the time, probably, like he used to offer the last time he was here. Always somewhere sunsoaked and low to the ground, even when he’d taken Dewah on a trip across Yanxia, because for all his excitement when they were younger he’d always noticed just how he’d balked at heights.

Instead of taking a seat, he quietly pulls a flower out from his bag and holds it out to Haruki when he walks over.

“One of the flowers someone planted in Mor Dhona,” he explains, after a moment of stunned silence, idly fiddling with one of the flower’s leaves. “I didn’t have the time to, er, stop by my garden, so no brightlilies, but this was already in the Stones’ garden and—uh.”

A’dewah stutters to a stop when Haruki pries the iris from his hands, gently twining his creaky, stiff fingers into his own. Purple, unfortunately, isn’t Haruki’s color—it’s always been Munehise’s, actually, and Dewah’s not quite sure what is _ Haruki’s, _ too used to seeing him in eye-searingly bright teal to think of anything else—but he smiles fondly at the iris anyways, sunlight skipping across his scales and turning them pure white.

“Sunshine, it’s perfect.” Haruki leans over, lightly kissing his forehead; cool against A’dewah’s flush that could rival the summer heat at this point. “Thank you.”

And A’dewah doesn’t know what he could say to that, spring’s warmth blooming in his chest as everything he’s wanted to say in his one (four?) year absence bubbles up at once, so instead he steps forward and pulls him into a hug instead, sighing a summer breeze full of promise and withheld adoration into Haruki’s arms. The Doman sunlight seeps into the dark leather of his coat comfortably around the cooler touch of Haruki’s hands splayed across his back, and A’dewah could melt if his bones weren’t complaining.

_ Of course, _ he thinks, letting his fingers curl into the fabric of Haruki’s shirt as he finds himself lovingly trapped in Haruki’s embrace.  _ What else would I have done? _


	8. put your feet up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #7: nonagenarian

“I do not _need,”_ Thancred grumbles as Krile maneuvers him to sit down on one of the cots. She’s already gotten him to take off his breastplate, what _more_ could she be looking for? It wasn’t as if a few scuffs to his armor were anything to be overly worried about. “To be _coddled,_ Krile, I assure you that I am—”

“—still injured from the gigas club you took to the ribs to keep it from taking Zaya’s head off, yes?”

Krile doesn’t even spare a curious glance up at him as his jaw stops mid-sentence, hanging just slightly open as he glares down at her, and then over to where Zaya is passed out, arms spread across the table to where Tehra’ir is fixing their bandaged hands. One of his potions sits nearby, half-empty and glowing a gentle green, even with the golden lamps burning away the night around them.

“Zaya told me—well, not _told._ Signed at me, before running off, really,” Krile muses as she prods at his ribs, and, okay, _fine,_ maybe the club he admittedly did take to the chest did bruise something. “Frankly, I’m glad they did.”

He sighs, letting Krile keep prodding. Collapse _once_ on the First because the connection between your soul and body is fraying and earn a lifetime of worrywarts looking over your shoulder.

(To _no one_ does he admit that later, when Zaya wakes from their untimely nap and comes over to prod him, that he doesn’t even make a fuss. The only person, apparently, that he doesn’t get fundamentally offended by when they persist on treating him like some millenia-old skeleton is the person causing it in the first place.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is based more off of the quote thancred says that this word HAD to have come from than the word itself sngnsdnfsdf


	9. live a little

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #8: clamor
> 
> .
> 
> sapphire weapon spoilers? sort of?

If Cid didn’t want him sneaking off and fiddling with the  _ giant mech, _ Elwin thinks he would have had the foresight to talk  _ first _ and show the really big, cool robot  _ after _ he finished talking about boring things, like safety precautions and the actual purpose of said mech. Really, he should know better by now—maybe asked Syhrwyda to tie him down, or something. Keep him from wandering off from below everyone’s noses.

Well. Either way, he would have found a way to sneak past, because they wouldn’t have let him near it regardless, not without a baby leash or something keeping him from getting inside. The incident with the colossus (and, yeah, nearly trampling Nero in the process too, he supposes) was several summers ago at this point!

With Wyda not paying close attention to him due to Cid’s lecture and the rest of the Ironworks crew he’d brought along not really expecting a renegade lalafell (well, except Seven, but he took one glance at Elwin, sighed, and looked back down into his pile of scrap metal salvaged from the old facilities nearby) he’d made it all the way behind the giant feet of the G-Warrior before he realized his first problem.

_ How the hells does anyone get in this thing? _

Even if he looked as far up as he could crane his neck, there wasn’t anything that vaguely looked like a hatch or door. In all likeliness, it might be something  _ strange _ again, like what with the other things in Azys Lla being overly complicated. Always with the tricky, strange contraptions with Allagans.

He taps his chin, quietly listening to the quiet clank of metal and what random words he can pick up from Cid. Someone from Ironworks might know just how to get in, though, so he looks over to where Seven last was and waves.

“Sev,” he whispers, smiling brightly when Seven peeks up from his pile of random scrap bits. Cid probably has some sort of rule that kept Seven from touching the G-Warrior himself, now that Elwin thinks about it, but a few rules could be broken if he looked innocent enough. Maybe. “Help me get into the G-Warrior?”

Seven’s nose scrunches up. “I—mm. Cid’ll have my hind if I help ya, but…”

“You can say you were just trying to stop me but I was faster, or something!” He taps the side of his goggles, adding a small wink at the end. “We can co-pilot. C’mon, it’ll be lots of fun!”

For a moment, it looks as if Seven might call Cid over and blow Elwin’s very, very shoddy cover, considering he’s not trying to hide that badly, but eventually he just sighs, drops the piece of Garlean warmachina shielding he was inspecting back into the pile, and quietly walks over, arms crossed in that way he does when he’s thinking.

“We’re going to need a step ladder,” he grumbles. “or maybe some other,  _ taller _ co-conspirator. Seat inside’s made for some ten-foot tall Allagan or something.”

Elwin sighs. Of  _ course. _ He could probably wheedle Valdis into helping, if he could grab her attention and no one else’s, but considering how tall she is and how  _ bright _ her hair is...

“Pardon,” someone says from behind Elwin. “But perhaps I could help?”

When Elwin turns around, standing behind him is a tall man with tousled brown hair and  _ ridiculous _ eye bags, still wearing his doctor’s coat for whatever reason despite having come up from Gridania to a former war zone, and part of Elwin nearly expects to see Marron lurking somewhere to make sure he doesn’t get up to anything funny.

“Viggo!” He’s known Nero for long enough to be familiar with the doctor, he thinks, to be his usual amount of energetic when greeting him. Viggo smiles, but the glint in his glasses suggests something a bit more than general interest in, well,  _ driving a mech around. _ “Wanna help us sneak into the mech, huh?”

Viggo hums his agreement, looking up at the G-Warrior. “I had thought it would be nice to get out of the clinic for a bit, and I heard from the grapevine about Ironworks’ new  _ project, _ of sorts. Could use a little bit of…  _ fun.” _

There’s something in Viggo’s eyes that worries Elwin  _ just _ a little, but it’s probably fine, and besides. What harm could the three of them do? It’s not like they’re going to swing around the giant swords  _ in camp; _ the salt dharmas would work as target practice—if they could get there in the first place, he thinks, quieter than the part of him that screams  _ WHAT DOES THIS DO AND CAN I BLOW THINGS UP WITH IT. _

Well, he thinks after, that’s what the test drive is for!

“Right,” Elwin says, dropping his fist into his palm. “Let’s get to it!”

It takes the three of them a lot of maneuvering and thinking to get into the G-Warrior  _ without _ Cid noticing, but the horrified screams and curses that crackle across Cid’s intercom when Elwin manages to get the G-Warrior moving are  _ so _ worth the trouble of potentially not getting dessert for the next few moons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am projecting my desire to steal a mech onto elwin and i am not sorry whatsoever.


	10. confidence boost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #9: lush

“Mel,” Auphine calls from the doorway, fiddling with her boots, maybe—A’dewah can’t _quite_ see her fully from where he stands in front of Lumelle’s (extremely dusty, clearly unused) vanity, more focused on clearing up the mirror than anything. “What are you going to do about your face?”

“Do not repeat this back to Mama, but I,” Lumelle huffs, and if she weren’t standing incredibly still so that Valdis and Lunya can finish taking adjustment measurements for her dress A’dewah thinks her arms would be crossed firmly across her chest. “have _no swiving clue_ what you mean by ‘what am I going to do about my face’, Auphie.”

Duscha raises an amused eyebrow over the brim of his book while Elwin giggles into his palm. No one really _expected_ her to know—at least, among that of the Scions and her usual friends—but Auphine makes an exaggerated sighing motion with her shoulders as she stands straight.

“You _know_ Mama’s going to want you ‘dolled up’, or what have you,” she explains. “And the other nobles—”

“If they give a damn, they can talk to the business end of Fragarach,” Lumelle grumbles as Valdis softly pushes her arms back down. Auphine sighs louder, and A’dewah didn’t think the little conjurer had that large of lungs on her; clearly he’s mistaken, by how her exhale carries.

“Do not tell me I did not warn you!” Auphine waves to Elwin as she leaves the room, the heels of her boots clicking against the wooden floor of the manor. Lumelle groans loud enough to wake Tehra’ir up from his slump against Zaya’s shoulder momentarily, eventually resting his forehead carefully back onto their shoulder, making sure not to press his eyes into the white of their dress shirt.

For his own merit, he does his best to ignore it while he carefully swipes the tube of lipstick across his lips, pausing when Syhrwyda leans over to pick up her hairpin from the vanity. She catches his gloss, too, when it falls on its side and starts to roll away; he could probably hug her for that. Damned glass vials and all.

“Mel,” Elwin says, his swinging feet tapping against the settee. “I think Auphie might be right.”

“...I know, but I—it’s not like I know how to use any of—of _that_ stuff Mama dumped onto me when I came back. Most of it’s probably dried up, by now.”

A’dewah, for the curious bit of him that is right next to all the old cosmetics, opens up a pot of what likely used to be a scented lotion that smelled strongly of sandalwood.

What he finds is nearly rock hard. Well then.

“Dress’s done,” Valdis says quietly, Lunya snipping the last bit of thread hanging from Lumelle’s sleeve. The high house dress… looks incredibly uncomfortable for her, he thinks, compared to the normal surcoats and cuirasses she’d normally prefer.

“You all should get going,” Lumelle says, looking up at the chronometer. Nearly the seventh bell. “I… guess I’ll be here for a while yet.” 

“Here,” he says, scooting over on the bench to leave enough space for Lumelle to sit. He waves the closed tube of lipstick in the air when Zaya tilts their head in confusion. “I can stay behind and help her.”

Lumelle, for her merit, gives him a wary glance that might as well be screeching _this better not end with me in a face of powders,_ but she trudges her way over anyhow as everybody else leaves Lumelle’s room. Zaya gives him a small wink before they turn the corner, pointing to the two corsages sitting at the end of Lumelle’s old bed.

“Why do _you_ know so much about cosmetics, anyhow?” She sits with all the grace of a lion stumbling through a minefield, really, shaking the bench as she falls back onto it.

“I have three sisters,” he murmurs as he fumbles with the containers and pots he’s laid out before him, opening to check the colors and closing when he looks back over to Lumelle’s skin. He should have asked someone else—surely Lumelle’s mother, but Lumelle herself would not appreciate her mother fussing about. Perhaps someone from House Fortemps would have known of some cosmetics common to Ishgard, and a merchant. Aymeric, maybe; he looks like he would know his way around a few brushes. If he’d the willpower, Hanami would have worked, too, having lived in Ishgard long enough to count as one of them... even if he’d probably get his head taken off in the process. “My youngest brother likes to, er, contour, too. Hard to avoid cosmetic talks when most of your siblings, who’ve been very much restrained in their pastimes since _forever,_ enjoy it? And…”

He taps the top of his cosmetics box; small enough to fit into the bottom of his satchel, beneath all the books and draughts he lugs around when he’s traveling by foot, all the pots and brushes neatly tucked away. He’d needed to buy newer paints and cremes when he’d gotten back from the First—a pain, seeing as he’d been without for long enough, but if the urge struck and he didn’t have his box refilled he’d probably see his anxiety spike—but none of them would match Lumelle’s darker skin either way.

“I, uhm, might have a bit of fun with this, from time to time?” The urge to wring his hands together is incredibly strong, but he fiddles with the latch on his cosmetics box. He hadn’t even really shown _Haruki,_ now that he thinks about it—more a private pleasure than anything, now out to his friends. 

_Character development,_ he thinks wryly. _You will be fine._

Maybe he should have waited to put on the lip paint, he thinks as he helps wrangle the rest of Lumelle’s hair into a nice crown braid. All straightened out, strange compared to the very wavy-haired Lumelle he’d passed by not a few mornings ago, and the coarse texture of her hair rubs oddly against the pads of his fingers.

Now…

“Could you turn to face me?” He carefully opens his cosmetics box to pull out a few small brushes—making sure to set them apart from the brush he’d already used, a new pot of cool red paint, and a small jar of dark powder. “Promise I won’t, er, go overboard.”

“I trust you,” she says, even though it doesn’t look like she believes it, and she closes her eyes.

The quiet click and clatter of closing and opening containers fills the comfortable quiet as A’dewah brushes powders and paints onto Lumelle’s face. He has to remind her with a quiet tap on her knuckles not to scrunch her face, sometimes, but he can’t quite blame her when he’s trying not to sneeze the whole time from the dust that flutters about in motes, the sunset fading through the window making them gleam.

“You’ll keep these after I’m done,” he says while he finishes up the edges of Lumelle’s lip paint, the bright red perhaps a tad too bright for how much he’s put on; maybe he can wipe a bit of it off? “Sanitary things, is all. I—I don’t expect you to keep using them!”

Lumelle doesn’t say anything, not even a quiet protest, instead turning her head to look at herself in the mirror.

“This is _weird,”_ she finally decides, after a few moments of staring intensely at the mirror. “Not used to my lips being… _red.”_

“Is it bad?”

He pulls out another tube of gloss—thank the Matron he’d decided to get a spare tube from that merchant in Ul’dah—and Lumelle sighs. “Not as bad as I thought it might, no. It’s just…”

Her brow furrows again.

“Here,” he mumbles, a bit awkwardly. “Put that on, and I’ll grab your earring.”

It takes a bit of fishing around in the drawers, unorganized as they are; he sneezes, once, when he opens it too fast and the dust goes flying into the air, but eventually he finds the slightly tarnished House Fortemps earring among the wreck that is Lumelle’s vanity. It gleams, still, in the fading sunlight, the red unicorn standing out among the dark grey metal around it.

“Done,” Lumelle says. He turns, and it’s… not as neat as he’d hoped, but it’s miles better than anything Vahno could have done, at any rate, so he presses the earring into her upturned palm among the light scars and smiles.

“There we go,” he murmurs, gently swiping his thumb to clean off some of the out-of-place gloss. “Grab the corsages for me, and I think we’re done.”

Lumelle nearly tumbles off the seat when she leans back to grab the two corsages, barely catching herself as A’dewah cleans up what he can—part of him nearly sets to cleaning the _rest_ of Lumelle’s vanity, messy as it is, but he manages to hold back. For now.

He pins the (rather extravagant) brightlily corsage into his own hair, the light blue kind of blending into his hair, and hands Lumelle the white one to place in her own. Once she’s got it all pinned down—well, he has to brush a few leaves away from her face; Valdis must have taken the other smaller one he’d made—he stands, and waits for Lumelle to follow suit before he carefully grabs her wrist, ignoring the chill of the thin rose gold bracelets Auphine had shoved onto her sister’s wrist.

“Now,” he says, lightly pulling Lumelle closer to the mirror and stepping next to her. “Try striking a pose, or—or, uh, doing something that feels just a tad exaggerated.” He nearly leaves off there, looking a bit at himself and the light smudge in his lipstick before realizing what might happen. _“WITHOUT_ getting your sword or shield. _Please.”_

“Killjoy,” Lumelle grumbles, but she takes one look at the two of them in the mirror, and her brow furrows deep enough that A’dewah feels a slight panic rising that the creme and powder on her forehead might crack. “Why with the poses, though. What’s the point?”

He has to think about, well, why _he_ does the silly poses in the mirror before he can answer. “C-confidence? I—mm, actually,” he mumbles, spinning in a small circle and watching the skirt of his dress shimmer, fabric glimmering. Maybe he was right to let Zaya help Lunya design… _this._ “It’s… nice?”

“Nice?”

“Yes,” he says, a bit braver now. “Something that has nothing to do with being ‘heroic’ or ‘strong’, maybe. Just… plain and silly. Normal-ish.”

Lumelle hums just before she moves quick, pumping her fist into the air with her stance widened enough that A’dewah can see she’s still wearing her normal boots just beneath the hem of her skirt. She’s plastered a goofy sort of grin onto her face, brightened by the bright red lip paint and the light bouncing off the mirror onto her.

“There you go!” He sways about again, planting one hand on his hip and swinging his other arm out with the swish of his dress, nervously grinning as Lumelle’s eyebrows raise under her bangs. There’s a few moments of quiet, almost like time is frozen while they stand in their silly poses; a bit awkwardly, seeing how his tail has swung out from behind him and Lumelle had managed to throw her braid over her shoulder. 

It hardly takes a moment for them to both be laughing, A’dewah nearly doubled over because _oh gods did he just do that_ and Lumelle’s hyena-like laughter isn’t helping, either. Something so preciously silly about that exact moment sticks in the aether, singing of first snows and brilliant sunlight as A’dewah tries his best not to wipe at his eyes. He lets his hands adjust the hems of his sleeves instead while Lumelle falls back into her blustery nervousness, cautiously wiping tears from her eyes before it grows quiet again.

“I am… not sure I feel any better about this.” Lumelle’s hands bunch in her skirt, eyes looking downward. “Part of the reason I left, instead of taking another trial by combat, I suppose. Never liked it all.”

That’s… about what he suspected. 

“That’s alright,” he soothes, smoothing out his own dress. He’s likely going to regret the heels in a few bells, but oh well. At least he won’t have to crane his head as much if someone _does_ decide to talk to him. “Everyone will probably be, uh, a bit tipsy anyhow. They won’t notice you too much, either.” He looks to Lumelle through the mirror, watching as she tilts her head back up, the corners of his mouth tugging at a nervous smile. He’s… not sure if he’s assuring _her_ more than _himself,_ really. “If you get nervous, you can come find me, probably hiding behind a—a planter, or something. The lilies the Ishgardians like to use are, uh, big enough to hide the two of us. Failing that—”

“We find Haurchefant and let his enthusiasm distract everyone so we can escape. Got it,” Lumelle says assuredly, nodding to herself in the mirror and finally standing straight.

A’dewah bites the inside of his lip to keep from bursting into laughter. “Right.”

With one last little motion—one he’s seen her do to pump herself up before a mission—-Lumelle strides out to the doorway with a certain bounce in her step that she didn’t have earlier, stomping as she did to Lunya and Valdis’ measuring tapes, the corset on her dress keeping her from moving around as she wished. A’dewah smiles. 

They would be alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know exactly zero things about makeup save for what i saw my mom doing a few times! dunno why i did this!!


	11. words will not suffice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #10: avail | spoilers for 4.4 MSQ, steppe portion!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> disclaimer: if you don't see anything wrong with A) hien participating in the naadam solely to leverage the position of khagan to recruit the xaela, thereby disturbing their ways and/or B) hien suggesting the use of the house of the crooked coin, a place sacred to almost all xaela in one way or another, especially the dotharl and the kagon, and hardly even blinking when sadu and magnai (leaders of two of fifty-one different steppe tribes) just. let him. you are not going to like today's fill.

In this past sun of serving as his moon’s right hand—not so much a burden as it is an annoyance, with how Oktai cannot speak, but his fair hand and open mind even with an Oronir in his bed is not one Magnai would trade for the simplicity of his time as reigning khagan—he has seen much. A conflict, once, between the Orben and Ejinn over the rivers and their bounties, and a minor conflict with Ura traders coming into Reunion with potentially volatile ores from the peaks that quickly turned into a threat when several Gesi hunters had bought the ores and turned the Steppe into a minefield overnight.

Oktai had handled those with grace, even with his sibling and fellow khagan away fighting wars for the Eorzeans they had cast their lot with. Hardly needed to wheedle respect from those who had seen him, either; he’d the same, unfortunate bleeding heart of his adoptive sisters, and the stubborn temper of Zaya within his breast, unable to let anyone go wanting despite their demands without bowing his head. It  _ had _ taken a few guiding steps, Magnai leading for the first few turns of the moon, but so easily he had fell into it so long as someone could speak his wishes for him.

He’d hardly had the rancor he’d expected when Zaya came fumbling home to help their brother succeed in another Naadam, and even less surprised when the Steppe yet again claimed them both of the land, both khagan still. So few souls on the Steppe were possessed of such strong will; if he were Dotharl—never did he truly  _ wish _ that, he thinks in a huff—he might think Oktai and Zaya two halves of a warrior’s soul. Perhaps the land itself thought the same, giving them the same rights usually won and worn by one.

This, Magnai thinks, stifling a sigh when he lifts his cup to his mouth to find the last dregs of his tea gone, is hopefully not the fall of Oktai from his well-deserved seat into a spiralling loss of control.

He has never seen Oktai so  _ irritated _ as he does now, taking his pointer finger and sliding it across the side of his left hand for Magnai to see; his sign for when he needs meetings to end. Magnai wishes he could grant that wish, but seeing as how the lordling from Doma is still sitting resolutely at the other end of the table, Y’shtola of the Seventh Dawn seated by his side and Sadu—damned woman, demanding a spar before they could begin just to see if he deserved to be seated as the khagan’s aide—practically ready to sear lines into the table, he shakes his head. Oktai’s face falls momentarily, the light purple bags under his eyes from a fortnight spent resolving a sickness among the Gharl painfully obvious, but Hien clears his throat loud enough to snap Oktai back to attention.

Magnai, as much as he despises Sadu and her every way, cannot help but agree in her incredulous stare. The other khans and khatuns were right to leave under veil of browsing the stalls of Reunion, for the wants of their own tribes.

“The Oronir have no hand in this,” Magnai grouses as Oktai’s fingers tap irritatedly against the wooden table. By Azim’s grace, he will need a cup of tea after this, if not a skin of kumis to drown the bells he’s wasted speaking in circles with this stubborn man in. “But this is no matter of a single tribe. Still you manage to test us all.”

“My deepest apologies,” Hien says with the authority Magnai expected of a man raised into rulership. “but there is war on the horizon, and I would not suffer  _ either _ of our lands being controlled due to a lack of communication.”

He does not scoff at his words—it is a very near thing—though a quick little smirk does emerge for a moment.  _ Controlled. _ How self-aware is he, Magnai wonders, watching Y’shtola quietly side-eye her companion. 

Oktai taps his arm, pulling his attention back to his hands; a few quick signs that Magnai hardly has the time to mull over, then a single finger held up, slowly pulled into a fist.  _ Together. _

He nods, and clears his throat, thoughts turning to weaving Oktai’s sentiments together in a way that doesn’t seem…  _ dismissive. _ “As we have said, the House of the Crooked Coin falls under no sole tribe’s jurisdiction. It is a place deemed sacred to all those blessed by the Dusk Mother, from the most devout to even the Oronir, born as we are of the radiant Azim; She still deems us Hers, gifting this land with Her aether. The pillars in the Crooked Coin are no simple matter.”

“And by my reckoning, there is no issue should I gain permission from the other tribes, yes?”

_ Azim be merciful, _ he thinks, rubbing at the edges of the scales on his forehead. It is not even as noisy as the last few meetings Magnai had held as khagan in his rule, but he finds himself with a headache of the same manner regardless.

“Yes, but you—”

“You,” Sadu says, pointedly interrupting his train of thought; if Oktai had not laid his hand on his arm, a gentle  _ hold on, let her speak _ in a single touch, surely this yurt would have devolved into messier infighting than that between a khagan and a king. “have not traveled far enough into our deserts to meet the Kagon; devout worshippers of the Dusk Mother. They will have your head for  _ daring _ to suggest the thought, as would I. You mean to rush something that will easily take moons.” 

The Dotharl khatun’s hands twitch against her arms, faintly gleaming with an abundance of fire aether that has Magnai wondering if he should call Daidukul to bring water. 

Hien, ever blind, breaks the silence. “Cirina had told—”

Oktai’s low groan, accompanied by Magnai’s eyebrow twitching, is enough to stop Hien from continuing. The quiet noises of Reunion closing stalls and retiring fill the silence, uncomfortable as it is; a wonderful evening, wasted on hours of such tedious debate. Sadu looks distinctly unimpressed, because all his arguments, eventually, circle back to the Mol—and she lies in Cirina’s bed; this, Magnai understands well enough. The fire in Cirina’s eyes was not solely her own the last Magnai saw her, no longer wholly the ethereal maiden he’d thought he’d wanted, but even then.

“The Mol are…  _ fearful, _ shall we say, of those with strength.” Sadu crosses her arms, glaring intensely at him. “Cirina is brave, yes, but not  _ stupid. _ She knows who and who not to anger. Including…” She raises a hand, almost dismissively in manner, towards Hien. “You. Protector of her people when Nhaama’s child fell and shrouded our lands in smog. Warrior of the Mol, who fought valiantly for their safety during that Naadam two years past. She has led you to believe, perhaps—”

“That the other tribes might fall in line, yes. I suppose,” Hien pauses, tilting his head up to the ceiling. “‘Twould have been better if I’d brought Zaya along, perhaps. They’d seemed neutral to the plan, at most.”

Y’shtola, for the first time in several bells, clears her throat. “That was because they have been ignoring every word that spills from your mouth, not because of placid agreement.” Hien almost looks scandalized, in how his shoulders fall. “Forgive my interruption, I simply thought it prudent to be truthful than impressive.”

Oktai shakes his head in a pitying sort of way, frown hardset against his face from what little Magnai can see of his mouth from this angle, where his horns cover his expression.

“Leveraging the khagan with his sibling would not change the problem,” Magnai says, voice carefully measured.

“Then what would?” The Doman lordling comes forth with a renewed determination in his voice, despite how he scrabbles so for any foothold, any respect within this sole tent. “Surely we can come to compromise at least for long enough so I might consult with the other khans and khatuns, regardless of how long it takes. Surely you understand the dangers of the Garleans enough to—”

“Hien,” Y’shtola says, her voice a sharp, unforgiving breeze among the stifling atmosphere of the Qestiri yurt.  _ “Enough. _ There is yet—”

“Is there?” Hien turns to his companion, and Oktai nearly slumps over the table, a sentiment Magnai himself reciprocates by crossing his arms firmly over his chest. How could two allies be so unable to reach a solid conclusion among themselves and hope to survive against the ironmen they fear so? “You had stated the lack of crystals in the Burn yourself; I’ve little reason to doubt there being no other deposit of aether nearby strong enough—”

Through Oktai’s hand, still resting atop his own, Magnai feels a shock of furious lightning crackle up his skin; not strong enough to harm but enough for him to know that when Oktai stands up in frustration and storms out of the yurt he has truly, finally hit his limit for the needless words of alliances and compromises from a ruler that has given no quarter, so used to his own homeland being drained of its own culture and sacred lands that he no longer sees wrong in doing the same to others subconsciously.

Magnai sighs in relief. He’d expected Oktai to allow this useless conversation to drag on longer.

“The khagan has spoken,” Magnai declares, standing from his seat. His tail aches something horrid when he stretches, kinks in his tail straightening out. The sun filters in slow through the crack in the canvas flaps, dust motes gleaming and covering Hien in a stark shadow as he remains seated. “If you truly think to convince  _ all _ the tribes of your duty and its needs, first you must convince  _ him.” _

Hien’s brow furrows. “I had thought our discussion a long ways from over. The alliance?”

“The little sun has misspoken.” Sadu stands, and despite the insult Magnai is inclined to agree—he  _ has, _ and now the Doman princeling has assumed. “Talks of alliances will wait. The khagan has  _ left.” _

“Certainly; quite rude of him, I might add.” Hien folds his hands in his lap, eyes misted over yet still hunter sharp, seeking a weakened point. “Has he not left his lands in danger, by denying us his approval before we have even begun to travel and visit the other khans and khatuns? Would he truly be so temperamental to quit the conversation ere we have truly begun?”

The harsh roll of Sadu’s eyes only serves to prove that, no, Magnai is not having some sort of nightmarish dream that if he pinches the scales on his nose hard enough he will awake in a Qestiri yurt instead. Shame that the only thing the two of them agree on is the merits of Oktai’s rule, and of how this discussion has long overgone its stay at this table.

Scratch the pot of tea. He will have to ask Taban for kumis if he wishes to rid himself of this horrible, horrible headache.

“If you cannot respect the time of the khagan and his people, you are not ready to speak of alliances,” he sighs. A shame; Hien is, rightfully, fit to be king—of his  _ own _ people, of whom he has already earned the respect of, learned the needs and requests of like the back of his hand. “A full turn of the sun and  _ still _ you have not learned, Doman, so I shall say it again.” He straightens to his full height, and Sadu barks out a laugh as she leaves the yurt, calling for Cirina and both their yols as she walks down the wooden steps. Hien, for his merit, does not turn to look bewildered at her, instead meeting Magnai’s stare.

“You have made mock of our ways since the very beginnings, Doman. Bardam’s Mettle is not a simple trial; our Naadam is not a little  _ contest _ for you to  _ win _ and tip the balance of our lands to win your wars. Even the Dotharl, respectful of warriors, have found you and yours  _ wanting, _ and yet you continue to play at the role of magnanimous ruler. The Mol bow their heads to you out of respect for a savior and friend, not king; they let you live among them and you did not  _ learn. _ Do not dare to presume so again,” he says, letting his voice rise and ring, and by the princeling’s side he sees Y’shtola shake her head. “Or you will find the khagan much less forgiving in hearing your useless words.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i like hien as a person (?), but the way 4.0 & 4.4's MSQ in the steppe portions happens leaves me distinctly tilted because in the lore of it _why would any of the steppe allow several outsiders to participate in and disregard their beliefs so wholeheartedly and let them live when they're said to be rather hostile towards outsiders in favor of clinging to their nomadic ways. why._


	12. illiteracy for two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #11: ultracrepidarian

He’s not sure when he decided to spend his afternoon in the Stones’ library, helping his dear friend (just a  _ friend, _ he stubbornly reminds himself) learn their way around a pen—perhaps somewhere between nearly running into yet another of his old paramours and the little glint in Tataru’s eye that always suggests she’s some horrid errand to foist onto one of them—but he certainly is here now. A stack of books sits to his left, Zaya and their quill to his right, and the unfortunate stack of papers and inkwell in front of the two of them.

In hindsight, Thancred probably should have scrounged around a bit more for a pencil, seeing how Zaya’s page is filled with ink blots more than anything resembling the letter ‘z’.

“Perhaps a bit lighter,” he murmurs when Zaya places quill to page and creates yet another splotch of ink. “Are you  _ certain _ you don’t wish for me to fetch a pencil?”

They shake their head vehemently, glaring down at the quill in their hand as they try again, quill to page...

“There we are.” Thancred smiles as they manage to write a (very shaky, close to illegible) ‘Z’ onto the page, looking up to him for approval. “Want to practice a few more times? Or perhaps would you like to try the  _ second  _ letter of your name?”

The corner of their eye twitches when he says ‘second’, sparing a glance back at the half-drained inkwell, then to him. Almost as if they are worried, more than irritated.

Ah. “Worry not, that inkwell is—”

“What a waste,” someone by the shelf rudely comments, and when Thancred looks up to see a head of white and a blue ribbon it’s not too hard to tell who it is.

“And did we ask your opinion, Alphinaud?”

“Forgive my rudeness,” he says in a tone that Thancred’s heard on dozens of other people who were  _ distinctly _ uninterested in hearing him out. “I simply thought it wasteful to try and teach someone who has not even the slightest hint of wanting to learn proper speech how to write. If one cannot even  _ pronounce _ the words they are writing—”

To his right, Thancred sees a flash of electricity, Zaya raising their arm holding the quill in a fashion not so dissimilar to a dart. If he were to turn his head, he’s certain their face would have fallen into a familiar frown of anger.

“Alphinaud,” Thancred says, mostly in warning. “I don’t think you should—”

“How does one even  _ survive _ so long in Ul’dah, of all places, without talking! Surely none of the Guilds would have accepted a speechless foreigner, much less one rumored to be from a land of—”

The quill that goes flying across the room, ink trailing behind and all, nearly pierces Alphinaud’s ear, barely missing when the boy moves his head to look closer at a title along one of the spines. Instead, it catches the cuff of his sleeve and sticks into the wood of the bookcase. Thancred sighs, watching as Alphinaud struggles to unpin his sleeve from the wall, and then has to bite back a laugh when the little brat falls flat on his arse, soaked quill falling right onto his white boots.

“I’ll return with a pencil,” he announces, and winks at Zaya. “Do try not to kill our friend, hm?”

Zaya’s little grimace as he leaves has him chuckling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my reaction to this word was literally "i. excuse me. gesundheit. _what the fuck does that mean._ "


	13. something's electric in your blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #12: tooth and nail

The nobles must have been bloodthirsty today, swarming like vultures around the Coliseum, Zaya thinks, if the lanistas had decided to place them in the same fighting brackets as the Bull of Ala Mhigo. Craving something terrible and magnificent. Something that surely would kill them if the two of them were not chained down by rules.

Even though they hadn’t personally gotten to fight him before, the tension that lies in the air between him and them is just as electric as it had been back home, when the top contenders of the Naadam stepped out, closer to the ovoo where they’d worked their way to just for the thrill. Zaya cracks their knuckles under the tape wrapping them close, readjusting where their hora sit on their hands.  _ Time for a show. _

They are the one to rush forward first—always have been, since Magnai had patience and Sadu did not find her mark in swords but staves—and when Raubahn meets their fist with ringing metal the storm in their chest sings.

It is still mostly play; no fighter in the Coliseum is fool enough to risk that, but he puts up more of a fight than any of the other fighters Zaya’s been pitted against, even in the damned free-for-all that was more akin to everyone ganging up on the smallest fighters first. Even this—as showy and reforged for entertainment as it is—this is closer to the fights Zaya had given up for their freedom.

Zaya braces themselves on the sands, feeling the heat from the lights seep into their scales through it as they kick upwards when Raubahn looks down, and the bull helmet he wears goes flying while they flip back onto their feet, ready to dodge—

Just not fast enough.

Raubahn’s fist colliding with their chest combined with him jamming the butt of Tizona into their stomach must have broken  _ something _ because crimson blood dribbles out of Zaya’s panting mouth onto the white of their pants. The corners of their vision are more than shot, their hora thrown across the arena from when they dropped them earlier, and if Raubahn has the common sense to aim at their horns now he’ll almost certainly kill them after they pass out.

They drop to their knees, the surge of roaring in the crowd their death knell.

Zaya is all but defeated, but the crowd calls for more, for greater, and both of them look to the coliseum criers in their safe little royal box for guidance, lower than the crowd boxes—low enough that only they catch the little rolling of the absolute arsehole’s arms.

_ Keep going, _ he’s telling them.  _ To the death, _ he means. 

Funny joke, Zaya thinks, adrenaline turning to nausea in their chest, burning excitement drowned and soured in golden fumes; easier to let one of their top fighters die than to figure just how to soothe the crowds they’d purposefully stirred.

The problem is this: both of them wanted a fight, but neither of them wants to kill the other noxius, both accused of crimes they have not committed simply because the entirety of Ul’dah is corrupt and shitty and  _ racist _ and wants to see them die gloriously, somehow, as  _ entertainment _ cattle. Yielding isn’t an option. Both of them have a merciless sort of reputation that they can’t give up by yielding at the cost of their sole livelihood.

Raubahn comes to stand over them, the tip of the shitty blade he’d needed to pick up to save his skull from being done in by their foot earlier now pointed at the scales on their forehead. Blood drips down the handle from the gash in his arm until it’s dripped onto them, too.

“Forgive me,” he whispers, solemn and sharp against the din of the crowd that makes Zaya’s horns ring. Mournful, but not sorry. “But someone needs me alive.”

The problem is this: Raubahn can and will kill Zaya if it means he gets the winnings, not because he is greedy—never  _ once _ has the Ala Mhigan struck Zaya as greedy, despite what the others say—but because his bail is higher than Zaya’s has ever been and his plan that he’s whispered to the other noxius at night, when the lanista is asleep and they are left awake, hurting, is to garner enough money to buy the Coliseum and turn its rules on its head. Buy his freedom, buy his life back, buy the whole institution that started this damned mess. Better Ul’dah, in what little ways he can.

Can’t exactly do  _ that _ if he’s got a rib stabbed through his lungs, can he.

Zaya spits out blood onto the sands, sight blurring and tearing up against the unholy lighting, brighter than fire bursting before their eyes. It is  _ obvious. _ The little boy that stares down like a hungry lion from the stands, who doesn’t have a father that loves him, who loves a fellow noxius who freed him like he was his only father, who  _ needs _ Raubahn to survive this match so he is not left to Ul’dah’s cruel streets like so many others.

Raubahn raises his sword, and when the blade rises the lights all turn to shine behind him, outlining him in shining white. Shrouding him in night pitch. The air is  _ boiling _ around them, the ashamed fury held in his gaze just before he closes it almost red. Zaya could close their eyes and find themselves back in a young girl’s skin, head bowed to an Oroniri axe as the scalding flames of the Dotharl’s reborn fighter boil them alive under Azim’s heat and Nhaama’s distant gaze, bow in hand and blood sticking their bangs to their forehead.

**_EVEN SHOULD I FALL EIGHT TIMES—_ **

The problem is this: more than a few someones need Zaya alive, too.

**_—I WILL RISE UP STRONGER NINE._ **

When the sword swings down, Zaya reaches up and catches it, letting the blade sink into their fingers as it begins to crackle. Blood runs down their arm, dripping onto the sands, letting them have their fill of noble’s drink as the air goes from boiling to electric.

The audience falls quiet.

They all burst into confused murmurs when Zaya starts laughing, because now that they’ve got their hand on the blade it’s not hard to tell just how  _ garbage _ the thing is, dulled by battle enough that even when Zaya’s fist is clenched around it the sword barely cuts deeper into their palm. They’ve stopped Oktai’s lance with their bare hands before. They’ve stopped  _ Magnai’s giant fucking axe _ with their bare hands before.

The blade shatters like nothing, its pieces joining the star array of the other metal shattered in this free-for-all under Zaya’s heel and Raubahn’s blade alone, a gleaming reminder of what anyone who steps into the bloodsands steps over in a blazing path to glory.

Raubahn keeps his stare level as he steps back once, twice, retreating backwards until his feet touch the blades of Tizona, leaving the path to their hora wide open; a mistake, if you were anyone dumber and crueler than the Bull of Ala Mhigo, perhaps. They’ve had enough mercies to know one when they see it.

It hardly takes them a blink of the eye to dash forward, scoop up their hora and go flying once more at Raubahn, blows meeting less like a true fight, more a dance. He isn’t letting them win—thank the gods—pushing against their punches with as much force as before. The Tizona’s edges glow bright with each clash, flaring hotter every time they pass over Zaya’s head; around the edges of the arena flames sputter to life, growing higher each time they make desperate passes at each other, and if Zaya were any lesser gladiator they’d have balked at the idea of being cooked alive.

But Zaya is more than a gladiator, and lightning strikes and burns hotter than any flame ever could; even when Raubahn’s cursed blades strike true against their chest and back they do not falter, lightning coiled around their hands as they strike back through the metal he wears before he can even move to block. Lightning is the blood that courses through their veins, thunder echoing off the walls of the Coliseum as Raubahn switches from offense to defense until Zaya finally manages to duck low and sweep his legs from under him. 

The crowd roars, but they are no louder than the thunder that sings in their horns as they kneel around his chest, staring down the man who has yet to flinch away from the electricity that burns in their palms even though the lightning branches in sharp red across his skin. His eyes are unfocused, still reeling from flashes of lightning thrown wildly at him, and Zaya thinks quickly that if they kill this man, here, for everyone to see, there will be nothing short of an outrage.

The only option, really, is to  _ force his hand, _ and Zaya wouldn’t rather die than tarnish his stance in the Coliseum.

Zaya wraps their hands the best they can around his throat—hells-damned  _ Roegadyn _ and their oversized stature and the fact Zaya wasn’t born seven fulms tall like Taban—and strangles him, praying even as they dig the sharp of their fingers into his jugular, the heels of their hand into his airpipe, letting his vision swim with the gaze of hundreds on the two of them. Their hands don’t slip, even with all the blood running down their right hand and into Raubahn’s hair, because he  _ isn’t struggling against it. _

_ Give up. _ They stare into his eyes the whole time, sweat and blood and tears burning at their eyes. He’s been holding his breath like some sort of—of fool with a deathwish, just like the audience has been holding theirs.  _ Not like this, you idiot, don’t make me kill you for this, YIELD— _

Raubahn finally,  _ finally  _ raises his pointer finger into the air—thank Nhaama, thank Azim, thank whoever and whatever is watching this hellhole—and the crowd bursts into chaos. Confetti begins to rain down as Zaya stands up and hears hollers of  _ coward _ and  _ savage _ and  _ monsters _ from the stands, some of it sticking to the sweat on their forehead as they hobble over to their hora, raising a fist into the air for good measure.

“Ho there!” 

Someone is calling down at them through the din, and both of them snap from their heaving gasps for air to see Raubahn’s boy, up in the arms of that white-haired man Zaya never seems to be able to shake, even trapped as they are in the Coliseum. Always as quiet as a spring breeze, even though he’s nowhere near as refreshing and is about as charming as a rock. “Good match! I’ll be taking him outside, alright?”

And just as he appeared, he’s disappeared into the crowd of people raging—not as infuriated as they might have been in J’moldva and Greinfarr’s tale, but far from appeased. A sack of gil goes flying at someone’s head; probably, Zaya thinks, someone who lost a  _ giant  _ bet in Ul’dah’s poorly hidden gambling ring, because who would bet on a random fighter over the  _ Bull? _

“Ignore them,” Raubahn wheezes, voice wrecked as horribly incriminating and suggestive bruises start to purple round his throat. The beginnings of a guilty niggle form in the pits of their stomach when he reaches up to rub the skin, so they toss the flask filled with hi-elixir they’d taken from their hip to drink at him instead. He catches it gladly. “Be proud of your victory. My dignity and reputation will surely return in time.”

And as much as they hate that victory comes at the cost of ruining Raubahn’s fame, no matter how temporarily, they  _ do, _ burning all the more brighter for it.

…

In the wake of dragging back who they could from Magnai’s demands—Lyse and Gosetsu all too stubborn, A’dewah too afraid of Hien’s scorn, Hien himself thinking it all a game like a fool—Zaya heads forth to Dotharl Khaa, because if rumors are true Magnai has not spoken to Sadu since half a decade ago. Presumably, when he took the Dawn Throne in the Naadam.

Zaya’d never thought they’d see the day Magnai would lead the Steppe—not from doubt. Mostly because they’d been expecting to die in Eorzea somewhere before they’d even built the courage and temperament to come back,  _ especially _ after the moon fell. Small mercies, maybe.

They run across the Steppe (it is not so long a journey if you are not a  _ coward, _ and Ochir is roosting somewhere in the peaks, probably), unfortunately catching a stray matanga and its blood all over their shirt along the way, so when they arrive in the desert at a blissfully cool night, they grab a bucket by the side of the small oasis and fill it with water before stripping and tossing the entirety of the cloth portion into the bucket. The chill sends the small aches of older scars to focus.

All the reason to work faster.

The water runs ruby red after enough time, and—looking around, Zaya sees no  _ safe _ place to dump the tub without running risk of polluting the rest of the water with runoff...

“‘Tis good to see you returned, Dzoldzaya,” Sadu calls, and the shock of hearing a voice so suddenly (not including their full name) has them falling flat on their arse, droplets of bloodied water flying through the air as they swing their arms back to keep themselves from falling farther. She keeps her gaze level even when she notices Zaya’s shirtless “What? Surely you did not expect Dotharl Khaa to be left unattended so close to the Naadam.”

When they push themselves back up, it’s easier just to pull their old bracelet from the Mol out of their pocket and toss it to her, trusting that Sadu will catch it as they get back to washing.

“Ah.” She steps over to their side, crouching down to look at the dirtied water. “Zaya, then.”

They nod, grimacing a bit when they pull out the cloth from the tub to see no discernable change. Still almost pitch black, even if there’s little difference between soaked blue and stained blue in the midst of night.

“Psh. Water purification is a simple thing,” she says offhandedly, dipping her fingers into the bucket as her hand glows. “With what little water we have without bringing back some from the Yat Khaal, it must.”

As the water clears, she pulls out the smaller bits of fabric out of the tub as her other hand taps low on Zaya’s back.

“You’ve new scars,” Sadu notes as she stands and wades into the waters of Dotharl Khaa. The storm blue of her chestwrap blends with the dark water when it soaks into the skirt. “Grown stronger, to wear those proudly, I hope.”

Zaya grunts in agreement, scrubbing at their shirt a bit harder to ignore the strange electric warmth lingering on their skin from Sadu’s fingers; it wasn’t this prevalent before, or maybe the memory is simply worn by the time they’d spent away.

For a good few moments, it is serene; the gentle splashing of moonlit water and the oasis flora rustling in the light breeze is all the sound there is until Sadu speaks again.

“Your soul—it is different,” she says, her voice almost serene to the constant brusk tone she’s adopted somewhere along the way, in the years Zaya hasn’t been here to face against her and Magnai in the Naadam for fun. “Before, ‘twas like a ocean breeze, bringing tidings of rain on the horizon. Gentle blues.”

She holds up the soaked bit of cloth meant to tie onto Zaya’s belt up, shaking it to see the large bloodstain shrunken and faded; her hair gleams in the moonlight, the rest of her doused in shadow save for her sea green eyes. It is hard not to wonder what she must see through them, really, so Zaya looks to her and tilts their head, thinking  _ what color is my soul now, then? _

They raise a hand from the cool waters to point at the moon. Sadu takes one look at them and guffaws, shaking her head.

“Everblue as always, you fool.” She pauses to dunk her hands back into the water. “Darker now. A shade torn from thunderstorm skies itself, lightning and all. Mauci says it has been an age since a soul like yours has graced the Steppe,” Sadu muses, the corner of her mouth tipping into a small grin. “Formerly in that of a child of the Dotharl, no less. Perhaps Nhaama led you astray.”

Zaya lets a little huff fall from their lips as they shrug; it wouldn’t be the most surprising thing, next to Hydaelyn and all the Echo bullshite. 

“Perhaps,” she adds, her tone now teasingly playful. “Should you fall gloriously in the Naadam, She will lead you back.”

That pulls a snort from their lungs, ungraceful as it is—that would be voiding the whole point they’d come down to the Khaa in the first place! They look up to her and tilt their head with a smirk.  _ Do you truly think that the Naadam will take me? _

Sadu gives a wicked smile, eyes gleaming with lightning stronger than Zaya had ever remembered. “I dare hope not! It should be my hand that tests you, not that of your outsider friends.” She wrings the cloth between her hands easily, wading out of the water. “Even if we are to fight together against your lordling fellow, I shall find a way to see just how bright your soul burns  _ myself. _ Perhaps drag that moonstruck fool down from his throne; make a reunion of it.”

“Soon,” Zaya promises with a wispy voice, tired from a day’s worth of travel and reunions, and a small chuckle leaves their chest when Sadu’s head whips up in surprise. “After.”

Sadu smiles, teeth sharp and gleaming like a predator’s, but soft like a friend’s, even if she has always had and always will have a bloodthirst to her. “Good,” she whispers. “I’ll give my all and prove myself once and for all in front of that damned fool who thinks I will bow to him and his  _ radiance.” _

_ Radiance, _ Zaya thinks when they start laughing, Sadu grinning like a lion the whole time.  _ Of course he’d grow a big head once I wasn’t here to beat it out of him. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two tangentially connected scenes, but yknow what? i wanted to write >:3


	14. our change of heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #13: free day || promises

“I could sew it on, if you’d like,” F’lhaminn says as she unclasps the leather harness from his coat on the table. The Rising Stones is particularly quiet today; some sort of hunt train or another led most of the rowdiest members out into Mor Dhona, if he remembers correctly. “In case the bow comes loose.”

“If it isn’t too much trouble…”

The strip of pink ribbon tied round his wrist falls loose easily enough with a simple tug, and Thancred places it in F’lhaminn’s outstretched hand with a light smile. A sewing kit comes out from her pocket as she sits down, humming under her breath as she sets about tying Ryne’s gift around the straps of his coat’s harness while he twiddles his thumbs, looking a bit nervously at the ground by her feet.

He probably shouldn’t have left  _ that _ necklace in his coat, knowing that the pockets were rather shallow, but. Well.

It became a bit like a good luck charm, he thinks. Too important to leave behind in the infirmary when running off to keep Alisaie and G’raha from trouble, too conspicuous to wear round his neck without attracting Urianger’s attentions—Thancred suspects Y’shtola already knows of it, considering how its aether rivals that of lightning crystals.

He’d made two promises, both for love; one to live for themselves, a pink ribbon keeping them together even a world apart. A sign of hope, bright color against the fade of white that plagued Norvrandt for so long.

And the second…

( _ “I’ll keep y’u safe,”  _ Zaya had whispered, pressing a ring into his palm back before the stars began to fall on the final days of their time away from home. He’d almost questioned them, snarkily asked if they wanted his gunblade, but a gentle wink and a flash of lightning in his hand, like something primed to burst, had him staying quiet.  _ “Think of me an’ the earth will listen.” _

“What about yourself,” he remembered asking after a few moments of awe. “‘Tis only fair.”

They raise their hand, on their finger resting a lunar orb surrounded by opals that glimmer like auroras, smiling when he realizes the little facets on the gems are not protection symbols but spell enchantments. A white gold band, like moonlight, like…

His smile was utterly contagious the rest of that day.)

His nervous glance away from F’lhaminn is more obvious than before when she pulls a ring on a small rose gold chain from where it had dropped on the floor, one brow raised teasingly.  _ Clumsy fingers, _ he’d say if he had the nerve—and if his heart wasn’t utterly betraying him and lodging in his throat.  _ A gift from a friend— _ not entirely the truth, but he’s long since passed hiding this, he supposes.

Instead, he just raises his finger to his mouth.  _ Keep it a secret? _

“Secret’s perfectly safe with me, dear,” she hums as she gently drops the necklace back into his palm. The ring shimmers lightly as it falls, a light shock of static running over the skin of his hand. “Don’t go breaking this heart, now.”

Thancred huffs fondly, closing his hand around the promise ring, relishing the light thrum of levin. Like a storm sitting in his palm, singing with life.

“I’ve no intention on doing so.”


	15. hero's journey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #14: part

Someone had noted—an age old teacher, perhaps, memories inlaid deep onto your crystal—that grief causes the greatest oddities to occur. Simulacrums formed of it weren’t so uncommon as one might be led to believe with a surplus of aether and enough love turned sour.

You just weren’t expecting to be one of them.

Like wildfires, you expect to fade back into the darkness of the abyss easily enough; the hands of such a young knight wouldn’t be able to bear being stained so pitch-black, you think, not when she glows with Halone’s blessing and something even more. Her hands leave freezer burns over the facets of your crystal, frosty fog forming as she keeps training, keeps hunting down more and more aevis until there’s nothing left. Even Ishgard’s worst blizzards fail to stand up against the winter storm of her fury.

Must be some sort of rebellion, violent and reckless as it is. You sit back (as much as a distant flame in the abyss can, anywho) and wait until the worst of her temper fizzles back into snowmelt—which, obviously, doesn’t happen like you assumed, otherwise you wouldn’t be here, now would you?

(When you hear the truth of it, crystal fed enough blood and aether to reach out further than just from the little knight’s pockets—when you hear _betrayals_ and _exiles_ and _my brother is dead because of your Braves, Alphinaud, what more do you want from me,_ your realization shows itself in coldflare and dark light, wrapping itself as best it can around someone so blessed and _“loved by the gods”_ as your ward.

Though you need her more than she needs you, it still doesn’t hurt, you think, to cover her armor in a veil of darkness, even when her shield sings of nevermelting ice and wraps light around her anyways.)

But eventually, it does; Lumelle—you find out her name from a man willing to jump in front of inquisitors and magical spears alike for his beloved friends—her enraged grief bubbles off into a quieter sort at the beginning of Ishgard’s new dawn, and you are left by her bedside when she falls into a sleep after destroying a wyrm with grief that, really, wasn’t all that different. (Besides the whole eternal lifespan and eyeballs of power, and the wyrm’s sibling being eaten by Lumelle’s ancestors thing. _That_ had thrown you for a loop.)

And oh, you expect it to end there, your tale that of accompanying a girl who didn’t need you so much as she needed closure; fading after protecting someone so bright would be an honor.

...

(But there is no rest for the righteous, now is there?)

...

Your next chapter opens in the palms of someone already acquainted with bloody hands, and though the little time spent out of Lumelle’s hands has left you wanting for your senses yet again, it takes hardly any time to figure just what _this one’s_ deal is. 

(Her hands shake whenever she sees her party’s astrologian—so small, her head is practically the size of your ward’s fist balled up—and the thought of Vylbrand sours every conversation like milk left to rot. Y’shtola utters the word _crone_ and the spike of earthquake panic you both feel lets you understand the jumble of misremembered nightmares that still haunts the warrior so far north from the place.

When she almost drowns herself in the memories, asking the sea to take her back into her arms, you are the one screaming the entire time—not because she is taking you with her, no, but because you can feel the summer breeze and hear the quiet pond rushing about the housing district looking for her, and you do not know what you’ll do if her death reignites Lumelle’s tempered anger.

The scholar cries out her name just as she falls too deep; Syhrwyda, you remember—you’ll force her name onto this damned crystal if you have to—and the breath of relief you sigh when the white mage forces the ocean to spit her out is all but audible.)

You expect her to let the little supernova cut her down, cleanse burns with blood and old aches with a trip into the abyss, because if Lumelle’s aches were screaming freezer burns then the gentle warrior’s are a quiet erosion. Even dripping blood can wear down a mountain, with enough time, and with a Calamity come and passed, the proof burned onto her skin, it is more than enough to see this mighty willow fallen to the skies opening up and pouring a tsunami’s worth of suffering in retribution.

Both you and her close your eyes when the axe comes swinging down, kneeling on the ground in pain. You do not expect it to be swift or painless like the rumors say of guillotines and execution, but you hope it is anyways.

And yet, and yet, the blade does not come.

(Part of you wonders: would the girl shrouded in fallen moonlight have done the same thing, if she had seen what Syhrwyda had seen? Would she, knowing that the choice was submission or death, have still seen her friend and ally in the woman that burnt her childhood with naught but a single incantation?

It matters not. There is no turning back time, and she has decided to give her friend a boon.)

It is not metal that comes, but a flurry of stars calling a lost sailor home instead, so potent that her magic seeps into your crystal as she collapses against your ward’s shoulder, whispering _I’m sorry, I can’t, I won’t_ like little wishes made upon falling stars. You don’t know if you imagined the croaked _it isn’t your fault_ or if you simply missed the mumbled movements, but Syhrwyda’s aether settles in time with the stars bursting across her skin and you know that your time with her will come to an end soon.

When she sets your crystal by a small crystalline lamp, you hum in amusement, letting yourself slip down into the abyss once more as the watery blue light ripples off the bookshelves.

…

( _Who are you?_ )

(No one of consequence.)

…

You find yourself more confused than before when the scholar picks up your small crystal, facets gleaming brighter than before but still dulled from decades of being frozen under Ishgard’s snows; nothing about him sings of the same pain like the last two. He pockets your crystal easily and you wonder just what use he’ll find from you if he _has_ no abyss of his own to draw from, no font to gather his strength for him to find.

(You miss how quiet he is in the din of everyone and everything else, tuned up to near painful when you open your eyes again. You miss the words he reads, the spells he crafts, the spared glances to his usual tome. Nothing about the man betrays it; hardly anything he does seems to suggest even a hint of regret, grief long since frozen over and forgotten of a home he’d long lost.

This was never an easy road—traveling down into the abyss and to rise back up again—and you do not expect easy wards, but the scholar—)

Even deadly waters can be calm at the surface, deceiving depths holding something stronger, and when he rises to meet the Illuminati and the (not _their_ ) primal, you start to see the signs of something lurking in the water and strain to open your eyes, drained as you are so close to Alexander. 

(You should have noticed how he balked away from poisons, preferring to sit far away from the rogue; you should have felt the gentle ripple when Mide mentioned Alexander’s purpose and wondered more.

It is too late for regrets, but it is not too late to stop this man, whose hands are too gentle and weary, from falling further into something he did not truly want.)

 _Are you daft,_ you whisper, and it’s not the best thing you’ve ever come up with but it’s the first words you’ve truly spoken to be heard. Like the rest, you expect your words to fall on deaf ears—stubborn people, the ones that have found you—but this time the scholar stops. Lingers, the precipice of a typhoon brewing up from the bottom of his soul. _Do you truly think this will work?_

“Not completely,” he says, his voice a quiet rumble as his small carbuncle shimmers and shakes its way into existence; part of you wishes you were strong enough to do the same just so you could shake the fluff out of this man’s brain to where it belongs. “But it might, and even the smallest chance...”

_What of your friends today?_

You don’t know what you expected, really; the scholar clams up and so do you, a connection cleaved in two as he walks away from the hand of the giant primal, stone in hand, and you are too exhausted to try and pry his heart open wider. Convincing him to let it all spill forth is harder than convincing a rock to move on its own, so you don’t try.

This time, when you fall back asleep atop a book with a soft leather cover, you desperately hope this is the end of it.

…

( _Did you know them, too? Did they lead you to me?_ )

(In a way, yes.)

( _Then you can stay, for now. Just… keep quiet._ )

…

And of course, it never is.

It’s hard to describe your next awakening as anything _but_ a bolt of lightning straight to your center, with how much aether rushes through your crystal and into the abyss. Too fast, too quick, like a flame burning too hot too soon. From freezing to the fiery depths of _hell,_ you think incredulously as you reach out, looking to just _who_ might be so dangerously close to tipping too far.

You don’t expect to find the timid white mage staring down at your soul crystal, red eyes and all.

(In a way, perhaps you should have known it would happen; the man was too damned reserved, all flower petals and no bark, the look in his eyes when he saw someone injured too intense for simple worry. He hates bloodshed yet makes his career in it all the same, and you’ve been held by Lumelle so tightly that you felt his magic—summer’s night bottled into a cure, blooming flowers pressed over scars, and you think nothing could be kinder than the way he loves.

Shame that you forgot that sometimes kindness is forged in the abyss.)

You’re sure he doesn’t mean to keep your crystal at all—hells, he sets it at the bottom of his satchel before he goes running off to join the fray in the same place that nearly killed him, the damned martyr—but you get taken with him regardless, and you see just how badly he’s dealt with it all. You don’t retort as snarkily as you might have with Duscha; your current ward is like paper thin glass, and you worry that if you push him he might break into pieces so small not even the sun’s light could find him.

In fact, you’re not sure what will happen if you make yourself known at all. He doesn’t seem strong enough to handle the idea that his guilt is making a simulacrum manifest.

(If you truly wanted, you could make him a fine dark knight. Teach him how to take his love and turn it into strength and protection stronger than anything the realm’s elements might give him, no matter how loved he is by them. Stain this white mage in dark.

But you see his dreams, sometimes—you never had found your way into dreams before, but with someone practically _bleeding_ their life aether onto you, a simulacrum fueled by memories and pain, it’s hard not to have new experiences—and his hands are always coated in blood. His own, someone else’s, his mother’s, his father’s…

You choose not to take him through the abyss. You don’t want to know if he’ll still be there when you walk out.)

Finding someone that might be able to help someone who very stubbornly _doesn’t want help_ is… a lot harder than intended. There’s not too many people… happy, with your ward; not after Baelsar’s Wall, and the man that Lumelle sent flying. You faintly remember a name—Caelestis, or something—but you care little for details and more for solutions, so you keep peering outwards and looking as best you can without fully peering into their heads.

That is, until that someone comes running at the white mage like a teal tulip some sylph chucked at you with the force of a demon.

(He introduces himself to everyone as Haruki, but you can’t help but call him Ruki after one too many trips into A’dewah’s head— _Dewah,_ he says, and you don’t know much about Seeker names but you know that it means more to your ward than it does to anyone else—and you think you can get him to help, even if A’dewah himself is trying to avoid him like the plague. 

_Especially_ because he’s avoiding Haruki like he’ll die if he doesn’t.)

It takes a few minor illusions and a trip to the Steppe (you didn’t know how to do these before A’dewah, you think as you practically lead a trail of hints from the Enclave to the tree A’dewah’s stuck himself in) but Haruki’s always been smarter than he might look (you still can’t get over the peacock feather of a mess his hair is) and eventually, eventually, your plan comes to fruition.

You don’t try to listen when they talk, but the rush of relief in A’dewah’s aether and the slow transition of summer bottled up tight enough to crack glass to the light warmth of, say, a greenhouse in full bloom tells you all you need to know, anyways.

(Doma is freed, soon after, and the Warriors are called back home, to Ala Mhigo’s war, but you look one last time out to Doma and see the last moments of A’dewah’s goodbyes, and of _course_ it’s Haruki he tells last. His eyes burn like a solar eclipse, and you think if it weren’t for his son—so small and brave, callouses already on his fingers—he’d come back with you.

You think it might be puppy love, somehow, but you take one last look at what you know and think that maybe he’s just tired of being left behind, of being the last one. Might be love, might be wanderlust.

It doesn’t matter. You still have to leave, even if it hurts.)

On the ship’s journey back through the Sirensong Sea, A’dewah finally acknowledges you, in a way.

“Thank you,” he murmurs to no one in particular as he ties up his hair tighter. His eyes aren’t reddened from crying anymore—just the unfortunate lot of his mother’s eyes being blood red by nature—and you think you can rest, now.

So you do.

…

(Don’t you understand to call for help?)

( _I can manage._ )

(So sayeth the Weapon of Light.)

…

From one firebrand of a caster to another, you think as your crystal gets put into Valdis’ open palms—you learn her name early, this time, instead of just before the climax of the story—and though her aether is quiet you know well enough that it doesn’t mean there’s nothing hiding behind it.

(It’s the same sort of longing for something long past, you remember. Duscha’s aether had a similar balance to hers, even if Valdis is mostly umbral shade and hardly a hint of water among the flames she pulls into form. Where Duscha was restrained she is explosive, and you don’t need to look too hard to find the root of the issue.

The thing is: you’re too exhausted.)

You’re lucky she doesn’t fight closer to the front line, like Lumelle or Syhrwyda, because you can hardly summon a shadow at this point—perhaps you were played the fool by A’dewah’s tears into doing too much, not saving enough.

But then you look at Valdis and think she might be fine on her own, eyes still lit up and hopeful. Spitfire in her hair and embers in her eyes, already burning like a flame that knows how to rise from her ashes already.

There’s something to be said about youth, maybe, and you sigh as you close your eyes and hope to wake when she needs you.

(The thing is: she doesn’t need to.)

…

( _... Hmph._ )

(If you’re expecting an apology, you’re getting none from me.)

( _I do not need—_ )

…

Your next venture leads you into the hands of someone so astrally aspected you don’t know if you can even summon the strength to peer outwards. Their aether and yours conflicts so greatly that it’s hard to tell if the abyss is flaring up or dying down, really, but you try regardless.

You will eternally be glad you do not have a face, because the pure shock when the face you see is one that was supposed to be long dead is not a face you’d ever like to see.

Lumelle had been your catalyst, and the little machinist before you the cause; you didn’t think he’d survived, somehow, even if you saw the monk that supposedly fell with him. He’s brighter than you’d thought he’d ever be, as close to the abyss as his sister was, and then you realize—

He _truly_ doesn’t need you. His eyes still gleam on their own, not shrouded by something buried deep. If Duscha’s abyss was well hidden enough for you to mistake it, there can be no mistake here.

When he keeps your crystal close, anyways, you close your eyes again, thinking that perhaps this time you won’t be needed like before.

And for the most part; he doesn’t.

(There are times, surely, when a speck of darkness flickers into the light that fills his aether, but you hardly need to look at it to tell it’s over something silly. A flame that will flicker out soon enough. You don’t lift a finger over that.)

In a way, his hands are a restless reprieve. You cannot sleep, truly, because if you do you don’t want to know how much your crystal’s facets will fade, but there is nothing for you here, either.

So. You watch.

…

(But. Don’t you want?)

( _I already want enough. I can get by._ )

(Doesn’t mean you should.)

…

The rogue plucks your crystal from Elwin’s bag, a shadow in the night, and you hardly realize the change until you’re set by a pack of crystals. You nearly think to panic—what disaster do you have to reconcile now, tired as you are—but then the rogue whispers like he already knows.

(Maybe he does. Every rogue you’ve seen through other eyes has always been a bit sharper than they make themselves to be.)

“Take a breather,” he hums, flipping his daggers in the air and watching them glint in the dim moonlight. You think you might know his name, uttered once or twice in passing, but you’ve hardly begun to rest from your time in Elwin’s bright hands and aether that it’s slipped you by once or twice already. “Ye’ve helped us out. ‘S high time we pay back, hm?”

 _I do not do this for payment,_ you sigh, but his aether is the easiest of them all, really, more comfortable than even Valdis’ despite the light chill of it. He doesn’t respond, merely whistling as he walks along the metal pathway—Garlean territory, and he’s so calmly strolling through it?

You don’t choose to rest, even though you could, and keep an eye on the man anyways.

(It’s worth the trouble, you think when you shroud him in shadows, narrowly avoiding the gaze of some wisened soldier who knows the tricks of the trade. Even if nothing’s gained in return.)

…

( _They’re...gone. They’re gone, gone, what do I do now—_ )

(Breathe. You’ll find them again. You always do.)

( _But what if I can’t this time? What if I find them only to lose them?_ )

(You won’t.)

( _How can you be sure?_ )

(Because you want to find them. I’m still here, aren’t I?)

…

There isn’t so much of a rest between leaving Tehra’ir’s palms and falling into the monk’s own, really; not when the rogue collapses alongside Valdis and the man with the eyepatch after some reverberating call that shook even you, incorporeal as you are. If you’d a physical form, the pain behind your eyes would be overwhelming; the sensation of being ripped from one’s body must be horrible, but even more so being torn from the very aether that keeps you.

Either way, the Elder Seedseer drops your crystal into their hands when she comes from the infirmary with a grim look on her face.There is something so familiar about this new bearer, aether so tempestuous and yet… calm. Leaving you contented and wanting all at once.

You don’t know what use you might be to them, either, but if you belonged in the hands of your past seven bearers then you are at home in theirs, lightning crackling from their skin to your crystal’s surface with great ease, for two non-metallic things.

( _There is nothing I can do,_ the Seedseer murmurs and the sharp ache that immediately takes over the dull pain in their head echoes to you and _oh,_ you understand more than ever now what you must help resolve, head spinning as the abyss flares and rages around you.)

You are there for _everything_ after; when they flee to the Steppe, when they hole up in the empty house, when they take Ochir and fly across the mountains until Lunya calls them back home. Your crystal is usually hidden away in their pocket, safe in the leather pouch and buttoned into the cloth of their pants, and never once do you feel ignored, sitting in mutual silence. There’s nothing to be said, really, because their loss is just as much yours.

Both of you grin when you finally, _finally_ make it past the gates into the First despite the horrid circumstances you have been brought to resolve, because it brings you both one step closer to finding them again.

(At first, you think they’ll be just fine without you, that you might be prudent to fall back dormant once more in face of the terribly draining light. At first, it seems like the others might just be a day’s journey away. The Exarch may be hiding things, but if the Scions are scattered then so too are the wayward Warriors; nothing so difficult as pulling souls back across the rift, yet.

Hah. When has anything ever been so simple?)

The journey is the hardest it’s been out of your eight travels, really; whether it be from the Light or from the constant confusion and grief that they struggle to pull from you do not know, and you keep your eyes open when they cannot—especially after Malikah’s Well.

(You are not the one fighting—never have been, even on that odd occasion that you’ve been able to force your way out of the abyss—but in Eulmore you see the flying eater’s wings seconds before they come crashing down on your bearer’s back with talons and when you reach out, for whatever banal reason, it is not darkness that springs forth.

At first, you think it a trick of the Light, because the last time you saw this shield it was back when you were still convinced you were ephemeral, but the next time you reach forth your ward’s wounds are healed in a burst of crystalline lilies.

You are not so stupid as to think this is your own strength, but they have not been with you for so long that you can’t tell what else it could be, what could be more than the others you have traveled with. 

Oh, how blind you were.)

Here, down in Amaurot, it’s harder than ever on them but the easiest it’s been for you, and when they start slipping you have to drag them back to their heels again, lest the Light breaks free and _both_ of you end up dead. You don’t have anything else to give—you do not have Lumelle or Syhrwyda’s inhuman strength or the healer’s prowess of A’dewah or Duscha, too incorporeal to give support like Tehra’ir or Elwin and too loud to stay as quiet as Valdis—but you are _there_ and that has to be enough.

(If Zaya themselves is not whole enough to be worthy in that Ascian’s eyes, then you will find the missing parts that make them whole and bring them home, because in your eyes there is nothing more than them and the little family you’ve somehow managed to pass through like a hand-me-down, and if you and the friends that remain are not enough to guide them through Hades’ abyss then one of _them_ will be.

And the funny thing is; you do, because the missing parts of their soul were the storm in you.)

The final days of Amaurot are _harrowing;_ you are there when Zaya nearly falls to a _bird demon,_ of all things, and you are there when the tempest of aether above a simulacrum of Emet-Selch’s world nearly shatters you into a million stars. It is less you taking the reins and more you standing by their side, the shadow in the light of falling stars that pushes forward when they cannot.

You think Ryne and Y’shtola can see you, can see the glow of seven crystals at Zaya’s side, but it matters not when Emet-Selch _still_ refuses to take reprieve of the abyss and see the merits of something different from what he knows; all that does is that you are by their side, a shade in a city of simulacrums.

(How funny is it, that in his grief Hades dipped into the abyss just as Zaya did in theirs?)

You don’t remember much of what happens afterwards. There is a blur of light, a man’s voice—seven voices you _recognize_ as the abyss flares and takes you back, because there is no space left here for darkness, not now. You expect to die, somehow, because you’d been fighting for so long in a place that threatened to swallow you whole and keep you there even if you followed Zaya resolutely, Hades taking you in his grasp and shattering you just to prove that they are nothing.

There’s a moment of clarity—when dark overtakes light once more—and you take the chance to stretch yourself out, to cover as many people as you can tell are here because Hades’ claws glow with something terrible and you will _not_ lose anyone now, not when you’ve found yourself in them. Even Urianger, even Alphinaud, even _Thancred,_ who is yalms and yalms away from Zaya—all of them have become too precious to lose, too beloved to let be harmed, and if Hades’ form is large then you will become the event horizon that swallows him.

(If you disappear here, it will be worth it—you have served your purpose as a shield, gouged on aether and memories as you are, and if you can give them even a moment more the price of your existence, as much of a simulacrum as you were, it would have been worth the trouble. 

If Hades wins you don’t know what you’ll do.)

But he loses. He loses, and you go home as small of a flame as you were when your journeys began.

And when all is said and done, your crystal ends up on a necklace of thin chain and leather, held close to Zaya’s breast. Dark lightning crackles over the shining facets, finally polished to its prime like it was all those years ago when your last owner died; even then, you don’t know if you can ever come back again, really, exhausted and drained and frayed as you are.

It matters little, those _ifs_ and _maybes._

(“No matter where you go,” the gunbreaker says, and you can feel Zaya’s soul warm, cracked as it is—or maybe that’s yours, feeling a bit like your own promises are being voiced through his. Ardbert, the bloke, smiles from behind you, and the little part of you that knows exactly how you and he are similar grins wildly. “I will be there, guarding your back.”)

When they need you next to pull them from the blackest of nights, you’ll be there to see the beautiful dawn they bring in return. There is nowhere else for you to go.

…

( _I’ll have to leave soon. Heroes don’t stay, you know._ )

(Well, you do.)

…

_From the depths of the crystal, a quiet light shimmers brightly, and you are reminded of home..._

_Action learned: The Brightest Dawn._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i Don't want to talk about how long this is NDGNSNDFNSND


	16. a life in your shape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #15: ache

The first time he realizes, the flowers in his hands are in full bloom; vibrant oldroses and brightlilies from his garden. Summer in Mor Dhona means the gloom clearing, and when Zaya drags him along to Lake Silvertear with everyone else he doesn’t really have the choice to say no, so he grabs his basket and weaves flower crowns by the shore as everyone chases each other around in some chaotic game of tag.

Funnily enough, G’raha breaks away from the crowd to sit next to him, at some point; he starts on a ruby red and white crown for him as he catches his breath. His eyes are bright, mismatched teal and Allagan red, and even though A’dewah hides his odd eye the same way G’raha does he wonders what he might look like with his bangs pinned back.

(That, he thinks, was probably his first mistake: thinking G’raha enjoyed spending time with him as much as he did. It wasn’t that he didn’t, but he’d always had the problem of hoping for more where he didn’t deserve it.)

He looks up, halfway through the crown, and sees G’raha still watching everyone scramble about—in the distance A’dewah can see a gigas, hopefully it won’t come much closer—and even though he knows it’ll break him, he keeps weaving flower stems back and forth as he asks, “Who are you looking at?”

G’raha sighs, unbearably fond, and A’dewah knows the look on his face a bit too well when he looks up. 

“Lunya,” he says, and it doesn’t take a bard to tell that he’s utterly  _ besotted. _ “How she’s so energetic I will never know.”

_ Oh, _ he realizes, fingers stiffening in the tangle of flower stems as he looks back at Lunya—she hardly even spares him a glance, waving only to G’raha. He’d thought he’d done something else wrong, like insulting her sense of fashion—which, honestly, wasn’t a reach, considering his coat and the earring—or being able to heal more than she could, or something even stupider, but  _ this— _

_ Oh, I’m an idiot, _ he thinks as Lunya looks away and G’raha can’t help but keep staring.

If he finishes up the rest of the flower crown sloppily, G’raha doesn’t say anything, not even when A’dewah carefully places it on his head and runs off, his heart askew.

(He doesn’t even say anything before he goes and seals himself off in the tower—not that A’dewah was expecting anything. He wasn’t a friend, really, so he expected to hear the news from someone else, expected to hear that he confessed just before leaving.

He doesn’t know what’s worse: the fact that he was stupid enough to think Raha cared or the fact that looking in the mirror, seeing one red eye and dark red hair—that it’s enough to make him ache.)

...

The second time—gods, he’s so stupid to have more than one time—the second time, the flowers in his hand are wilting. It’s fall—flowers usually die off sooner, so he’s not sure why the ones he has are simply wilting—but it is also Coerthas, and the chill is enough to make  _ him _ want to wilt.

So is, he thinks, Haurchefant’s smile. Bright and blinding, full of life.

(He’d known he’d fall from the moment they met the man, after the raid on the Waking Sands and before the fall of the wild roses—he’d  _ known _ what would happen if he let himself accept the kindness Haurchefant had so freely given, and he’d seen Reese’s reaction to his exuberant greetings. He’d known.

He doesn’t know why he didn’t try to stay away.)

The Vault is a blur; flurries of flame and magicked armor, the Heavens’ Ward, the number of elixirs A’dewah drains to keep up—and even then, he’s only got so much of himself left when Haurchefant falls at Zephirin’s spear, and if it weren’t for Lunya he’d have bled himself dry to save his smile, even when his heart aches at the thought of a knight sacrificing everything for his ladylove.

(It’s terrible, his jealousy, so unwanted and unkind. He does not hate his friends—they’re stronger and sharper than he is, anyways, and if he did actually come to hate one of them they’d surely be able to tell and break his spine for it—but part of him wishes he were good enough to be wanted in their place, and everytime he thinks about it he feels worse than he did the last time.

He’s good for something, sure. Maybe that something is healing. Maybe that something is making his friends hate him.)

Haurchefant survives, of course; Lunya is so much stronger than he is, so stubborn that she wouldn’t have let his tale end here, but even stars have their limits. Right after the Vault, there’s no one left among them with enough energy to keep watch, in case something goes awry. Reese offers to stay, but she looks ready to collapse even moreso than A’dewah does.

When Count Edmont asks who would be keeping watch, A’dewah practically forces himself into their sickroom before anyone else, and keeps himself up that night watching the quiver of their connected aether rather than the quiet burning in his stomach.

He hates himself. He truly does; why else would he stick so close?

…

He doesn’t even remember why he has dead flowers in his hands the third time—something to do with a sudden cold snap killing even the hardiest of flowers around Ishgard, and volunteering himself to see if any plants were saveable under the packed snow—but it’s a halfway decent example of what he feels like when he sees Aymeric and Hanami walking along the cleared path back to the row of minor houses, away from the Last Vigil.

(The fact that he looks at them and  _ wants _ makes him sick. He should want for nothing—he’s alive, he’s not in a gaol, he’s—)

A’dewah’s not sure he looks back down to the grey dirt fast enough to avoid Hanami’s quick turn, coldfire gaze freezing him in place more than the weather, but he sure as all hells tries. She’s already angry enough at him as is, having heard the truth at the Wall and then right from Ilberd’s lips, the bastard.

(He can’t say he didn’t know before—it’d just sound like a lie, no matter how true it actually was, even with desperation reddening his eyes and leaving tears dripping from his chin. He doesn’t know how to say anything that might make them listen again, doesn’t remember any half-decent apologies that he’d spewed to his sisters—and those never worked, either.

It was easier to let them hate him, anyhow. Better to let a tainted flower die than to give it one last chance.)

He’s not sure what breaks first, when he hears Aymeric whisper  _ is aught amiss _ and he suddenly wishes (selfishly, horribly, wickedly) that he was the one he was speaking to; his composure, or his heart, but he curls up further into himself anyways until he hears two sets of feet walking away.

(And if his heart bursts open after that, summer rain melting Ishgard’s winter snow, there is no one around to tell him to stop being such a crybaby.)

…

“—keep yer hands pressed down hard, I’ll be right back with a healer—”

“—go, I got it—”

He doesn’t know who’s speaking, head spinning as it is behind closed eyes, and he only realizes he can’t feel his hands when he tries to rub his eyes and finds he can’t.

“Hey,” someone asks—someone from earlier, but A’dewah’s ears ring and he can’t think too hard on it without everything fading, so he just tilts his head somewhat to his left to show he’s listening. “There you are. How’re you feeling?”

What he says, he doesn’t quite hear, but maybe it was something like  _ tired _ or  _ drunk _ or… something; he can’t accurately describe the feeling-non-feeling of being unable to move but still there. The only thing he can tell is that there’s a weight on his chest, and that it smells a lot like iron. Kind of like an infirmary, packed with injured, if he thinks about it; too close to Rhalgr’s Reach after the run-in with Zenos.

Right. Zenos. He’d been fighting alongside everyone, sneaking out to the spring night—was it Yugiri that told them the crown prince was here, or someone else—and he remembers the red crackle of his third blade, and the disgruntled groan of—of  _ someone, _ he can’t remember who, and he’d ran forward…

“Can you focus on breathing for me?” 

A’dewah does; at least he’s good at listening, if not for anything else, his breath evening out. His head stops spinning enough for him to  _ think _ once he does, but even digging for the name to place to the voice is hard enough. He finally manages to crack his eyes open enough to see past the blur, then, and blinking a few times clears it enough for him to realize two things:

One:  _ Oh. Haruki. _

Two:  _ That’s a lot of blood in the towel on my chest. _

If he could feel his hands, he might have tried to feel his chest, lay his hands on top of Haruki’s—they’re covered in  _ blood, _ doesn’t he hate the sight of injuries, doesn’t he hate the smell—but he doesn’t, because his hands don’t move when he tries to. Like a puppet, strings cut, unfeeling. Instead, he just looks down as much as he can, the white coat he usually wears gone and a cut in the black turtleneck he’d been wearing. The lily of the valley from Mune that he’d tucked into the collar of his coat lays at his side, stained crimson. A bit like his hair, now that he looks at the mess; maybe red dye wasn’t the best of choices.

_ Zenos, _ his mind supplies when Haruki shifts his hands a little and A’dewah sees the gash.  _ You jumped in front of his sword for someone. _

Well, that explains all the blood. Probably. 

(A part of him is disappointed Zenos didn’t cut away enough of him to prove to Haruki that he’s not worth the trouble, that he’s not as kind and hopeful and brave as he used to be, but he doesn’t say anything. He’d just sound pathetic.)

“Don’t worry about it,” Haruki says, even though he looks like he’s about to panic when A’dewah looks back up. His little grin is too sharp, at the edges, glued into place, and even though he knows something’s wrong more than just a lot of blood and an injury he doesn’t fight it. He probably wouldn’t, even if he could. “Just stay with me, yeah?”

Sure. He nods, staring up at the ceiling, and then to Haruki, a question at the tip of his tongue.

“Are…” He coughs, and the way Haruki winces makes him grimace, too. “Are they… safe?”

“...Yeah.” Haruki’s face twists into something strained but fond at the edges, and A’dewah doesn’t like the way his heart skips a beat for it. He can’t—it isn’t. He won’t let his heart ruin him again, even if it means ignoring the way his traitorous ears flick back when Haruki reaches up and brushes his hair out of his eyes, even if there’s still blood stuck on his hands and even if the sticky feeling makes him feel ill. “Dewah, keep your eyes open, ‘kay? Think Tehra’ir’s almost back with someone.”

He nods again, but his vision is already blacking out at the edges—oh, he thinks, blood loss  _ will _ do that, huh—and when Haruki looks back up at him he’s already got his eyes closed, heart heavy and hearing fading as he starts to fall asleep, even when Haruki calls out—

.

.

.

“Dewah?”

He jerks up, already halfway to standing when his knee connects with Haruki’s ribs; for his merit, he only lets out a small  _ oof _ before A’dewah realizes where he is. He blinks a few times, just for good measure.

Right. The One Garden. Napping under a tree, flowers (that he wasn’t certain were there when they sat down) blooming around them as the breeze made them sway.

“S-sorry! I didn’t—I thought someone was—” He’s not sure whether to lay his hands over the spot where he’s  _ sure _ Haruki will bruise or to sit back down and stay still so he doesn’t smack him again, so in his fluster he decides on  _ neither, _ wobbling back and forth between the two until Haruki pulls him down into his lap.

“No worries, sunshine.” Haruki smiles brightly, and A’dewah’s not sure if he bristles at the reminder of his heartaches or at the gentle touch he puts on his shoulder. “Accident, yeah?”

He nods, face a bit flushed as he tips his head down. There isn’t blood, anywhere—horrible of his head, to throw him back to then rather than letting him dream of something stupid, like Zaya’s oversized sheep and even more oversized yol terrorizing Revanant’s Toll, or singing flowers. 

“So, uh,” he says after a few moments, feeling a bit more himself. “You called?”

“Yeah. You looked—” Haruki pauses, then, to yawn, lifting his hands from A’dewah’s sides to stretch his arms. “You looked distressed,” he says, resting a hand on his head and lightly tracing a line down the shell of A’dewah’s ear with his finger. “Bad dream?”

“A bit,” he mumbles, folding his hands in his lap. Wanting to reach out but a bit afraid to touch, like if he lets himself do what he will this will all fade away into the abyss of his nightmares. Like he’s fooled himself into thinking someone cares, again.

But Haruki reaches out first, raising a hand to scratch at the base of A’dewah’s ear—he should have never told him all those years ago that he  _ liked _ that, too easy a tell and too easy a cure to his aching heart—and he all but melts into the touch, cooling the skin where the summer sunlight has warmed.

“We still got a few bells; you can go back to sleep, if you’re still exhausted.”

“No,” he says, but he still lets himself fall back onto Haruki’s chest—and, yeah, maybe he’s still tired, because he doesn’t even flush at how close he is to his heartbeat, letting his fall in time to it. It’s a bit strange, how he just…  _ fits, _ in some way that if he had to describe he’s sure he’d die for good. Even being swept up into group hugs by Syhrwyda and Zaya wasn’t as comforting as falling into Haruki’s cool touch—which, kami above, that’s even more embarrassing to think of. “This is fine.”

“Oh,  _ now _ it is,” Haruki grumbles good-naturedly even as he wraps his arms back around to the small of his back, and A’dewah giggles—stupidly, maybe, but there’s no one around to judge him for it. “Tell me; what changed from a bell ago to make you okay with cuddles now?”

“You’re warmer now,” he replies, and as the wind rushes through his hair again all he hears is Haruki’s laugh, bright as the sun even beneath the shade of the plum tree.


	17. imprimatur

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #16: lucubration ( **NOT** lubrication, like i thought the first time i read the prompt)

Sharlayan is, from Y’shtola’s experience, not a place where you oft see new faces—or perhaps it was just too common to find the children of your former teacher or the friend of a peer around each and every corner. The general isolation from Eorzea as a whole didn’t help the perception she had of it, either, considering the lack of any travelers or outside interventions. An annoyance, at times, when it seemed like even Sharlayan’s halls lacked what she needed.

Perhaps that’s why when Louisoix and Thancred returned from a short reprieve in Limsa nearly everyone had flocked to the Roegadyn and the  _ Hrothgar _ that had journeyed back with him. Both of them stuck out even in Sharlayan’s rather diverse halls—even Mikoto had noted how odd it was to see a Hrothgar outside of Ilsabard, much less one of Duscha’s age, and Syhrwyda’s height had her sticking out of any crowd and crouching down to talk with others, much to Mistress Kokoye’s dismay. Both held tomes on their hips—arcanists, by the looks of it, so Y’shtola hadn’t much reason to talk any further than pleasantries and small questions with them, considering where her expertise lied.

That is, until she found out their fields of study.

A chilly night, by all records; most of the students Y’shtola had known to stay out later than recommended had already retreated to the comforts of their rooms, surely feeding their fireplaces with enough wood to last the night. Even Urianger and Moenbryda had moved their studies somewhere warmer, both bidding her a good evening as she passed by, surprised to see her in the Studium’s campus as they were. With the winter, she’d had to return—that night, she had merely been in search of a box of tea, to aid with the essay she’d been writing, when she caught the hints of rustling pages and mumbled calculations near the doors of the study hall.

“You’ve missed a few equations for the aspect of the host’s aether here,” a low voice says, and Y’shtola pauses in her pursuit for tea. “And the bit here, for the surrounding aether; something isn’t quite right.”

She pokes her head around the edge of the doorframe, and surely enough she catches a glimpse of mint green fur and honey golden hair, hunched over a table as the windows lightly rattle with the blizzard outside.

“And here I’d thought the two of you had been intending to turn in a few bells ago,” Y’shtola calls softly as she quietly makes her way to their table, the glow of aether-powered lamps turning the air into quicksilver, the shining mint green of Duscha’s spell fading to a light grey as it touches their quills. Duscha’s back stiffens, tail going straight, but Syhrwyda merely straightens out calmly, stretching her arms upwards with her quill in hand, very close to dripping ink over her hairpin.

“We  _ were,” _ Syhrwyda pipes up. “But then I finished up me brew an’ got an idea, an’ Duscha wasn’t willin’ to go t’ bed without me, an’. Well.”

She waves her hands about over the array of papers and tomes the two of them have laid before them; in the mess of Syhrwyda’s slightly blotted pages and Duscha’s comparatively pristine ones, she catches sight of a few geometries  _ more complex _ than what she’d seen even Urianger attempting, with his mad idea of reconfiguring carbuncle matrixes to fit other stones. Among them are tomes with titles she hardly recognizes (well, save for  _ On the Lifestream and its Possible Applications in Spellcasting; _ she’d managed to get Miss Masya to loan her that one more than once, and its contents were well worth the struggle), including several on the more…  _ restricted _ sides of magic, if she recounts the slight argument she’d overheard the other day while she searched the library for Lyse.

How curious.

“Is this it, then?” Y’shtola leans over Duscha’s shoulder to pluck one of the pages from the table, holding it up against the silver glow to see the shimmer of Syhrwyda’s mythrite ink, laid out in the pattern of… 

_ What in the seven hells, _ Y’shtola thinks as she peers a bit closer at the shapes. Though it has the same landmarks of complex summoning arrays—complex! Syhrwyda had hardly been a student for two years, not nearly long enough to manage this from Master Aisibhir’s teachings—there are none of the proper attuning points for any gemstone that Sharlayan might stock. It almost resembles something torn from the Allagan study students’ tomes, but even more twisted than that—she takes one look back down at the table and sees a tome on  _ summoning, _ the same one that Y’mihtra had requested that morning.

Consider her curiosity peaked.

She grabs one of Duscha’s next, stepping just out of their reach as she traces the lines—so unlike any arcanima the professors had taught, so  _ strange _ compared to what might grace the contents of any other tome. Despite his neat writing the slant and script he prefers makes his much harder to parse than Syhrwyda’s, but Y’shtola catches something that is distinctly unrelated to aspected aether and arcanima alike among the mess and squints.

“I’d thought your thesis was on  _ carbuncles  _ and what adjustments might be made to their arrays for variations,” she says after a moment of silent awe, pointing at Syhrwyda first. “And  _ yours—” _ she turns to Duscha, not even thinking to revel in the utter shock on his face, usually so stoic that she might as well mistake him for a gargoyle. “Thancred said you were thinking upon how unaspected spells might be aspected to change their purpose! So what are…  _ these?” _

Neither of them look too interested in responding, frozen in their seats as she steps back into reach, but she rustles the papers once and takes a curious look at the rest of the pages they’ve scattered across the wooden table—gods, there are a good deal of them; she wonders just how far they’ve journeyed into their ‘proper’ fields of study if this is their alternatives—and  _ that _ seems to give them an idea.

“We can explain,” Duscha says, voice higher than usual, followed by Syhrwyda practically collapsing with a whine of “Please don’t rat us out to Miss Masya, I worked  _ hard _ t’ get access to the upper levels of the library.”

Y’shtola hands back their pages with a small smile, sitting next to Syhrwyda. Perhaps she’d have to put more investment into learning about her peers than she’d originally thought.

“Do tell.”


	18. you found me there

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #17: fade

The gentle creak of the mattress wakes him even before the light  _ click _ of Zaya’s heels hitting the floor; never one for socks in bed, apparently. He’s always been a light sleeper—or not one for sleep at all, after Lahabrea’s bout in his skin, but even as Zaya’s summer storm warmth leaves him he doesn’t make to show his hand, catch them in their nighttime escapades. He can handle the returning chill, slow in its descent but inevitable without his thunderstorm to wrap him in their lovely arms. Naught but them can cover his aches in rain and kiss lightning into the dark corners that refuse him sleep.

He will just have to make do until they return, left with the fleeting company of their shadow.

Twilight pours in through the window out of the corner of his eye, face still mostly mushed into the pillow Zaya wedged there, saying his forehead was bony when he rested on their collarbone. He listens to the quiet movements Zaya makes, counting their footsteps between gentle waves of sleep, trying to soothe him back under without the storms to lull him back to bed.

“Th’ncred?”

He stirs, turning onto his side to greet them with a small smile.

“Found me out, have you,” he says, sleep muffling his voice but endlessly fond as always as Zaya walks back to the edge of the bed, metal boots thumping against the hardwood floor. Duskshard is strapped to their back, glimmering just as the night outside as the Crystarium’s endless wishes stand enchanted to its blade. “A quiet escape, thwarted by your lightly sleeping companion.”

“Sorry,” they say, reaching out to brush hair out of his eyes. The leather of their glove is worn, soft enough to not feel odd when it rests on his cheek, thumb brushing against his cheekbone. “Lunya needed somethin’. Back soon.”

Thancred smiles, even as his eyes threaten to close. “Was never worried, bluebird,” he mumbles, reaching a hand up to trace the edges of their scales, below the detached sleeve of their not-quite-dress that’s still somehow made for tanking. He’d trace up to their horns, if he could, were he not trapped by the warmth of the covers he’d missed sorely on the First and in the Dawn’s Respite. Nothing could compare to the blankets Zaya had gifted him for Starlight, a piece of their home given to him.

Even then, the light patterns he traces across the scales of their forearm, painted with Nhaama’s blessed night as they are—they are enough to elicit a rumbling trill from Zaya’s throat, a lovely thunder crashing into Thancred’s heart.

“Go back t’ bed for me,” they say, letting their hand linger a moment longer so their warmth stays with him, a burning memory left onto his skin as Zaya stands back up. The twilight only serves to stain their figure with even more blue than what they already wear. “Sleep enough f’r th’ both of us; Lunya may keep me up all night.”

“Ah, but you said ‘back soon’. How am I to tell the truth,” he quips, relishing in their light sigh of well-meant exasperation. “Or shall I greet you with the sunrise—take a page from Aymeric’s book, perhaps—”

“If y’u call me  _ sunrise _ I will have to run away,” Zaya says simply, crossing their arms with a stifled laugh. “Dewah n’ Hanami already had a issue with pet names.”

“Do tell,” he yawns out. Anything to keep them a bit longer, chase away the shadows as shivers wriggle their way up his legs even with the fabric wrapped taught around them. 

Zaya leans back down with practiced ease, holding Duskshard to the side as they do. The fluffy edges of their bangs brush against his chin as they lay a kiss to the side of his neck, lips light against the edges of his Archon markings that sends dark lightning down his spine. A low giggle rumbles from their throat as he takes the chance to brush his fingers over their horn, committing the bumps and scars from healed fractures to memory; something to dream about, perhaps.

“Later,” they whisper against his skin. A promise. “When we are back.”

“Promise me one more thing,” he asks, feeling awfully selfish to make demands of his bluebird like this, in his half-waking state. “Don’t get hurt.”

He does mean it in the sense of  _ please don’t come back bleeding, _ but there’s always more, always something else; Thancred doesn’t understand soul crystals as well as any of the Warriors or even, perhaps, Urianger himself, but he knows how the one dangling from Zaya’s neck as well as his own heart. He knows the shadow that follows him and its name and he knows the name of the shadow that follows Zaya. He knows what can happen if something ges awry—he has the scar on his arm to show it.

“Of course.” Zaya presses one more searing kiss to his skin, a foudroyant strike among the gentle tug of Thancred’s slipping lucidity, before they back away, stepping back from the bedside.

His legs crave to follow them out to the doorframe, watching their back and the sway of their tail as they go. The door opens, and the golden light that pours into Thancred’s room as they step into the Rising Stones’ hallway makes their necklace gleam beautifully as they turn back one final time, raising their free hand up with their pinky, pointer finger, and thumb outstretched and the other two firmly set against the palm of their hand before lightly waving it back and forth.

_ I love you. _

Thancred wriggles his hand back out from the warmth of his covers to repeat the motion with fervor, drinking deep of their blessed grin to soothe the light worry in his heart as they leave.

As he hears their footsteps down the hall, a second pair joining them as they race down the stairs two steps at a time, Thancred turns back over into the colorful pillows lining his bed. Zaya’s lingering warmth has faded away, but so too has the sleeping fear that had brought Thancred awake, so he buries his face into the cushions and lets the twilight waves pull him back in.

...

_ (“Haik,” the shade in his dreams call, a strange familiarity to the way they say it. They raise their hand the same way Zaya does, waving their hand with three fingers extended; a moon crescent smile graces their face, and he finds his heart racing when they ask, “Is it like this?” _

_ He—Haik nods, raising his hand in the same way as the shade’s grin widens, lightning bright enthusiasm at his reciprocation. _

_ “I can’t imagine how you come up with these things,” they say excitedly as they remind themselves what the sign looks like. He catches a crackle of electricity between their fingers as they stretch all of them out. “I would have forgotten these in a snap of Emet-Selch’s fingers!” _

_ “All you have to do is keep practicing, Atalanta,” Haik says, reaching out for Atalanta’s hand. “If you remember to use them, the meaning won’t fade.”) _


	19. unburn the ashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #18: panglossian || shadowbringers spoilers, since amaurotines.

“Do you think,” Atalanta asks as the world starts to crumble, and he can already tell this won’t be easy. “I should resign from the Convocation?”

For a moment, he thinks to say  _ yes, _ because the Convocation has tried for too long to tame a storm they do not understand, too prissy and stuck up to see the merits of change. Quick to snuff out anything that isn’t of use to Amaurot, even if it has merit to those outside, in the lands that Atalanta always talks of nowadays.

But not all of them are like that. Even he knows the newest Elidibus adores Azem.

“No,” he replies easily. His arms are wrapped as best as he can around them, holding tight to what he will lose; his mask is still placed neatly on his nose, but Atalanta had tossed their red one aside when they’d gotten to their meeting place under Halmarut’s jacaranda tree. “When have you  _ ever _ liked being part of the Convocation, anyhow.”

Atalanta snickers, even though he can feel their fingers curl up in the cloth of his robes. “Never, really. Well; besides… you know.”

_ Hemera, _ his mind supplies.  _ And Asteria, Pan, Cerberus, Hermes. Even if they aren’t quite. _

(He wonders where they are, now; he hasn’t seen them in an age, buried in tomes and crystals alike in a desperate search to find something,  _ anything. _ He remembers the wine color of Hemera’s eyes, bright even when dealing with Atalanta’s trail of destruction; remembers Asteria’s shimmering creations that were beautiful regardless of how they were blinding; remembers the butterflies that fluttered into existence in Pan’s hands and the warmth that came from Cerberus’, Hermes watching carefully and waiting to step in and help.

He remembers when Atalanta was bright, too, lightning torn from the skies and brighter than even that Quetzalcoatl filling their form. He remembers how it felt to love them so.

He still does. They might be on their final curtain, storms fading to light rainshowers, but he is impossibly pulled towards them anyways.)

“I don’t know what to do,” they exhale, lips flush against his bangs; levin crackles across his skin, setting him alight. “I don’t want to stay.”

The world burns around them.

“Then don’t,” he says in turn. He hates how easily it falls from his lips. “Then leave.”

“What about—”

“—me?” His hands can’t quite spread across all of Atalanta’s back, soothing water humming in his palms. “I’ll be fine,” he promises, even though he knows what Emet-Selch has called him for, even though he remembers Melisseus and how her bakery is abandoned but pristine without its owner, golden light calling home someone who isn’t even there. “I want you to do better than here.”

Atalanta pulls away from him, lightning bright eyes watery even as their soul dims. “Are you sure? ‘S not like everyone else has left yet. I can still stay with you.”

_ I can at least make you happy, _ is what he hears.

It’s not what he wants.

“I assure you; if they haven’t yet, they will.” He lets his hands trace down Atalanta’s arms until he can wrap his hands around their fingers. “And it would be truly terrible of me to keep any Azem here any longer than they need to be, hm? The Traveler has places to see.”

And even as he sees the worry in their eyes he knows this will be the last he ever sees them, no matter how hopeful he is. Not even the skies themselves could stop storms from rolling onwards, dying in torrents of rain and returning again, and not even he can stop Atalanta from hating what the city they hardly ever loved has become.

So instead, he lets them. Even if their sins boil over and leave them with nothing, something in him is sure that they will meet again—as something smaller, perhaps; something not made to rise mountains and give life with a snap of their fingers, something that does not know the world’s beauty but can learn.

He can hope that he will recognize them next time.

“Remember me,” he whispers as he steps back, letting their hands drop to their sides once more. “And I’ll be with you. Call for help and I’ll be at your back.”

The skies break open.

…

_ Haik, _ Atalanta calls when Amaurot has fallen and Emet-Selch is no longer their teacher, when he has already given himself to the second Creation made to battle the Convocation’s, when they are tired and weary and unable to see the day.  _ I hope you’re watching. _

And when Atalanta begins to sing Haik’s crowning glory at the end of all days, making their path to the Convocation for the final dance, not even the terrors of fear turn to look their way.


	20. always been my north star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #19: where the heart is

Tehra’ir’s  _ sure _ that Jacke hadn’t meant to dawdle overlong at the docks, but Perimu and V’kebbe’s hollers were both irritating and impossible to ignore as they walked by, having commandeered the Fisherman’s Bottom dock for their training purposes. If the questions from the new recruits weren’t enough, Underfoot and Stray almost always had some quip to throw at the two of them.

Even when they’re a bell later than they’d meant to be, climbing ramps up to the upper decks hastily before the Bismarck closes and tripping over loose stones, Tehra’ir can’t help but grin.

“It’s yer fault if we leave tonight utterly banded ‘cause we couldn’t stumble into the Bismarck soon enough, alright?” Tehra’ir tugs at Jacke’s hand for emphasis, and he laughs, turning his head over and peering over his shoulder back at him. His eyes shimmer like the sea, the fading moonlight bright as night gives way to dawn.

“Bene,” Jacke replies as they start to cross one of the bridges, wood and metal clacking quietly under their feet. He doesn’t know how Jacke manages not to lose his balance, but  _ he’s _ not the one being pulled along, so maybe that’s it, and not the weakened muscles talking. “So long as I can tell e’eryone how ye got yer dew beaters trampled by that Roegadyn dove back in the plaza.”

He gives an indignant squawk at that while Jacke slows down to a walking pace, letting go of Tehra’ir’s hand to wave towards the Bismarck waitress standing about, looking for… some late reservation, probably. Tehra’ir’s not good with sundials, or positions of the sun, really, but he can tell enough by the number of people sitting at tables inside that it’s certainly late enough for the last crowd hoping to dine at the Bismarck to have already sat down.

“A thousand pardons, good sirs,” H’lahono starts when the two of them are close enough, and both of them slump a small bit. “But walk-ins closed about a bell ago—”

“Let ‘em sit at the table ‘round back, H’lahono!” A voice calls from around the bend of the Culinarian’s Guild archway, and when Tehra’ir turns he finds himself snickering at Syhrwyda’s head sticking out. “I’m sure that last reservation ain’t coming tonight, an’ if the kitchen’s loaded I’ll whip up their supper.”

She waves her hand slightly to show off the pan she’s found—her new one, from before they got whisked away; he remembers Duscha questioning quite loudly how she manage to spend so much on a pan, and Wyda’s response of  _ the embossing in the bottom  _ and  _ it’s bigger than the last pan that, by the way, Elwin wrecked for his experimenting _ while Elwin hid behind Zaya’s tail—and H’lahono sighs before quietly walking along. Jacke huffs something like  _ always got connections in all sorts o’ places _ as he follows the Miqo’te waitress, hands loose at his sides.

“Wyda, yer already up an’ cookin’?” Tehra’ir crosses his arms with a smirk as he follows. “Thought Krile said none o’ that, neither.”

Syhrwyda waves her free hand as she stands up straight, her apron, oven mitts, and all. “What she doesn’t know won’t kill her!” Her cheerful smile straightens out to merely a light simper as she asks, “So; what d’you feel like eatin’? And your  _ ‘friend’ _ over there?”

With a light flush on his face, he shrugs—he trusts Wyda enough to take creative liberties, and it’s not like either of them have aversions to much—and clears the last few fulms to sit across from Jacke at the small table, H’lahono having walked away to go clear some other tables plates, or what have you.

“Yer golden-haired friend o’er there obviously feels at home ‘ere, cookin’ an’ all,” Jacke muses as he leans back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head. He’s taken off his bandana, for whatever odd reason—Tehra’ir can’t remember the last time he’d seen him without it. It’s almost strange, but familiar enough to when they were both green around the ears and nicked just about everywhere from their own stabbers. “But what about ye? Surely ye coulda snilched up on that house ye’ve got with the others down in the Mist than terrorize the  _ Astalicia _ an’ our newest.”

Tehra’ir shakes his head—first of all, he was  _ not _ terrorizing anyone! No one cared about his singing on the First, and second of all: “‘S too  _ empty, _ Jacke; feels too much like a ghost town when no one’s home.”

“Then yer sister; she’s got her longboat deals over with. Saw her walking down Hawker’s Alley in the lightmans! Did ye not want t’ tell her yer home?”

“I can go see her anytime, really. Shootin’ Star’s not that hard to find, what with the shiny baubles stuck t’ it,” he says, resting his head in his palm as his tail swishes under the table. “But I wanted t’ see  _ yer mug _ first.”

Jacke’s eyes glimmer a small bit, ripples across the sea from the wind, and the corner of his mouth turns upward into that small, fond smirk Tehra’ir hates to admit he loves. One of his hands falls from behind his head to just barely graze Tehra’ir’s hand on the table.

“Are ye saying what I whiddle ye are?”

Tehra’ir kicks his shin with a grin, barely keeping from bursting into laughter when Jacke goes from soft and fond to exaggeratedly offended. 

“Maybe so, Jacke!” His voice pitches up higher than he expected, and for a moment his ears must pin down, because like a boat rocking to and fro Jacke’s face keeps switching expressions faster than he can tell, now to concern.

Jacke’s hand reaches out to cover his, comforting warmth as they both look around—no one  _ seems _ to have cared about the two rogues being daft at the edges of the Bismarck

“Consider me honored t’ be yer guidin’ star, then,” Jacke whispers as Tehra’ir rubs at the back of his head, sending another flush across his cheeks. 

“Of course.”


	21. solar eclipse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #20: free day | perihelion

To the sound of ruffled feathers does Oktai wake, blinking sleep from his eyes as he untangles hair from round his horns. Taban would call him a fool if she could, seeing how he utterly and completely collapsed onto his bed after just a week of proper Khagan duties, seeing how he forgot his usually careful braid to keep from waking to the morning chill and an absolute mess. 

In his waking dream, he catches the last few glimpses of yesterday’s golden dream, indulging in the fleeting image of his sisters taking their supper in his tent rather than at home with their mothers, firelight and shadows dancing around the walls of his tent. The air nips at his skin as he pushes his covers aside, an unwelcome greeting to the day but one he must accept nonetheless. Any normal morning, and he would have lingered in the embrace of his woolen blankets, let the light be blocked out by the woven pillows and plushes Sarnai insists on dumping into his lap whenever he goes out to the yurt he should still live in, at the edges of Reunion.

Outside his yurt, someone shuffles their feet, fingers brushing against the closed canvas flaps and letting shards of morning sunlight, bright and blinding, scramble their way into his yurt.

Nhaama save him, if that yol—or falcon, he supposes, thinking of the Domans once more—has carried someone seeking audience so early that not even Iturgen khan has not yet graced Reunion with his presence he is going to have _words_ to _say._

He tries his best to carry himself as someone worthy of being khagan would, but today he was promised by Taban herself that she would ward off who she could, staying the night in a temporary yurt. Today, he’d been full intending to simply rest—aching muscles and bandaged legs besides, the bags under his eyes had begun to worry even Zaya, who had known he suffered with a lack of sleep since they were small. If it were later, perhaps he’d have tried to present himself better than one who had just rolled from his bed, somehow put together like Magnai had been in his reign, but he is _tired_ and _new to having constant visitors_ so instead he harshly pulls back the flaps of his yurt to glare in the eyes of—

Oh. Magnai Oronir himself.

Part of him starts to wish he dawdled to fix his hair, right about now.

“Ah. Khagan.” Magnai eyes him curiously and if it were not for the fact his arms _hurt_ and moving them too fast would result in reopening wounds Oktai would have hid his face in his hands. “I have caught you at a bad time, I take it.”

Oktai grunts in agreement. _No shite._

“Bold fashion choice, Oktai,” he continues, crossing his arms over his chest and _oh,_ if his lance weren’t propped up at least a few yalms away from him he’d have the thought to sweep Magnai off his feet—not in the way that would have Tuya giggling, either. “Surely your hurts are not so grave as to turn away a single audience. Your sister seemed inclined to agree.”

How Magnai managed to convince Taban, who has been wary of him ever since he asked Sarnai if she was his Nhaama, is well beyond Oktai, but if she saw him in he’s not quite able to decline, now is he.

He lets one of the yurt flaps fall down as he covers his yawn, stepping aside to invite the Oronir khan in—surely, if he has come so early in the morning, taking his yol right from the Dawn Throne to Reunion, surely it must be of import. Enough to push aside his stomach’s low burning hunger. He ambles about, lighting a small fire while Magnai settles down too stiff to be here for business; perhaps something about the spring falling into summer’s heat, then, something worrisome that has not yet torn itself into an issue proper.

What he doesn’t expect when he sits across from Magnai is the words that spill from his mouth, like water into the Azim Khaat. Like sunlight dripping slowly through his palms as he raises his hand to block the sun during his checks around Reunion every evening.

“You have heard enough of me asking about for my Nhaama, I am sure. As a child of Azim, it has been a belief I have grown with, held just as dear as my axe,” Magnai says, and the light twitch of his tail has his brow furrowing just slightly. “As of late, I may have had a revelation as to why I have searched for so long without answer.”

 _Oh,_ Oktai thinks idly as he sets another piece of firewood into the small pit. He’d… not quite expected this; now, with the morning chill having given way to the warmth of the flames, his stomach feels much too strange, turning 

“I was told she would be gentle. Ethereal. A dancer in the morning mist born of the dusk.” Magnai clears his throat, a flush just barely apparent on his cheeks as firelight dances across the gold of his hair. “But I see the same in you, and I question whether I have been searching too far all along.”

Oktai tips his head even as he feels his face flush brighter than his, pale skin not making a good canvas with which to hide his flustered state. He had not expected Magnai to be so… demure? Soft-voiced, about this?

His confusion must register as disdain, as Magnai inhales sharply as his eyes meet Oktai’s, finally lifted from the embers of the fire.

“Though I have been known to make demands of others,” he explains, hands clasped together in his lap as if he might break should he let go. “I would not make the same of you. You and your sibling, I have known for long enough to… value our relationship. More than most. If my words discomfort you—”

“No,” he blurts out, and when Magnai’s eyes widen he _knows_ he’s already stepped in the hole, so why not finish. “I—” He stands up, abrupt as he walks over and sits himself closer to Magnai, now, worried of how he might convey this in a way that would make sense. One that takes less words, something that he is… not out of his comfort, to express.

He settles for brushing the knuckles of his hand light as a feather against Magnai’s horn, keeping his rather embarrassed stare level as he looks into the golden glow of Magnai’s eyes and seeing a glowing sun in the warrior’s shock—one more bearable to look at than the one rising just outside. Swathed in yellow and goldenrod, he is, about as close to the sun as he might get without filling himself with flame.

And perhaps it does get across, with how Magnai’s face softens from his tense stare and his hands unclasp.


	22. anything that glimmers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #21: foibles

The lamp’s glow sets Zaya’s array of gemstones and precious metals ashimmer, reflected light colorfully gleaming across the smooth wood grain of the table and to the glove on Thancred’s hand. He’s been simply waiting, watching Zaya and their scarred hands work wonders on what he’d ordinarily call a stone, nothing more, always a steady hand and sharp eye on their work despite his best efforts to draw their attention. A summer’s night well spent in their company, even if he’s slowly being coerced into helping them polish, free hands wandering across to their side of the table in search of

(If he were any more a fool, he’d have questioned how one so fluent in war could take so easily to the craft; hands stiffened by scars covered by scale and eyes used to the quick flash of thunderstorms do not make for detailed work, and though he’s known many a veteran to put down their weapons and pick up a trade he has never seen work so detailed as this come from someone who sacrifices their body for power.

Thankfully, he has had a long time to get used to it.)

“You are a  _ hoarder, _ you know that?” Thancred lifts up a small moonstone—high quality, renowned for its impossibility to find in Eorzea proper unless you were well acquainted with tomestones and Rowena or a very proficient miner with wanderlust—and watches the pearlescent surface shine as he fiddles with the sphere between his fingers. “I still cannot fathom how you managed to carry your hoard of shimmering stones up to Amity.” Even more unfathomable—how they managed to part with said hoard to create a Talos the size of a mountain.

Their hand leaves the earring they had been fixing the loop of to reach for his hand, the platinum of their ring glimmering as it passes through golden lamplight as their fingers wrap round his. A fond touch as they wrest the moonstone from his fingers, instead replacing it with a ring as his next quip slips his mind.

His ring, actually, the lazurite stone he’d managed to knock loose by dropping the damned necklace by F’lhaminn’s feet back in place. Within the lazurite, the lightning patterns gleam brighter as Zaya’s thumb rubs at the knuckle of his pointer finger in quiet adoration; the levinshard fragments inlaid into the ring itself gleam a lovely lavender as their hand drops back down to the table, the unbearable desire to follow their dusty, calloused touch a low rumble in his chest.

“Don’t drop it ‘gain,” they mumble with a levin-quick smile pulling at the corners of their mouth. “‘S hard to get Feo Ul t’ help me here.”

Thancred nods, gently slipping the ring on instead of digging about for the chain he usually hangs it around his neck with; it doesn’t feel right around his index finger, but he’s already pushing his luck by keeping it on him at all. He’d already managed to lose his earring once, even before he was constantly trying to restrain Zaya during their chaotic traipses.

Ah. The thought he’d surely lost before returns.

“If  _ anyone _ begins to start accusing me of having sticky fingers with random trinkets, I am blaming you,” he says warmly, taking note of how his bluebird’s grin before they cover their mouth is sharp, teeth pointed even as their brilliant laughter fills the warm air like the comforting smothering of a summer storm, and stows the memory away like something precious.

(And though he calls them magpie and crow in teasing adoration, maybe he is the same too, hoard made of the times he no longer wants to let go but cannot return to.)


	23. before it's too late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #22: argy-bargy

“You should go talk to him,” Ardbert offers.

Zaya shakes their head.

“‘S fine,” they answer, even though their smile tells him it clearly  _ isn’t. _ He’d never seen their grin so strained as it is now, after their return from the Greatwood, one Master Matoya in tow. Something had happened, there, that had them distraught enough to lie—in-fighting, perhaps, or maybe the dismay of not finding their wayward friends yet again.

Whatever it is, he knows that their situation with that gunbreaker and the Oracle is helping none.

He raises an eyebrow, crossing his arms.  _ Here’s to hoping this won’t get any worse, then. _ “Is it, now.”

They nod, this time, but their eyes still look through him and to the jewelry box they’d set on the table behind him. Filled with mementos and the bracelets they wear, if he remembers. Under it; a note they’d set aside before they set off to vanquish a third lightwarden.

“Amh Araeng is next, isn’t it.” Ardbert steps a bit closer, the corners of his mouth turning downwards. “Is that lightwarden yours to bear?”

A shrug.

He’d sigh, if he didn’t know that Zaya could easily flip around and punch him. “Wouldn’t it be better to get this over with, in case it doesn’t—”

“I’ll be  _ fine,” _ they counter. “Have to.”

“...Fine.” Ardbert might not be the best of people to turn to, and if they won’t even  _ admit _ it to their fellow Warriors he’s all there is left, really—but even he can’t find anything else to say but this. “Promise me you’ll  _ talk _ to him at some point. Doesn’t have to be anytime soon, just…”

He doesn’t know why he cares so much about Zaya’s friendship with Thancred, anyhow; the man had been nothing but curt as of late, regardless of how he’d jumped to save them from Ardbert’s axe back when they first met on the Source, regardless of the fire he’d seen in the man’s eye.

“Before it’s too late to say anything.” 

Zaya nods, and Ardbert steps back.


	24. i wanna know what you're doing tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #23: shuffle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from [hiccup by valley!](https://youtu.be/T_ZaVZ8CQKU) this song's about heartbreak but this fic sure isn't :3 takes place in a modern "main street" AU with balefire/mom squad where zaya's a courier and thancred's (probably) an indie artist (or something. don't @ me i haven't hashed out the details on my end-)

For all intents and purposes, Zaya enjoys autumn; summer heat cooling off into a pleasant chill, the sunlight that lingers enough to keep warm in the early weeks. The trees may die, but in doing so they grow colorful, and though the flowers in A’dewah’s little shop don’t do the same he changes which ones are on display to match better with the tree outside. It _does_ mean Krile—and more recently, one G’raha Tia—have to return to Mor Dhona, their studies resuming, but it’s not like they can’t _chat._

It does, however, mean the return of autumn showers—and they don’t even _hate_ rain that much—and fortunately Zaya managed to _forget their poncho_ just as the first big storm pulled in. Mor Dhona wasn’t that far of a drive away, really, just two or three hours on a road Zaya had taken enough times before, but in the middle of a rainstorm? Without a rainproof coat?

Well, at least Miss Eldfalk’s documents are staying dry in the carrier at Zaya’s back, even if the chill of the rain has already soaked through the wool of their jacket and started to dampen their shirt by the time they pull into the parking garage just a block or so away from the museum waiting on Sjanna’s delivery. Thankfully the inn is just an elevator away and not on the other side of the road; they should keep a spare poncho or umbrella in the motorcycle luggage next time.

Zaya pushes the thought aside as they slip off their helmet and the phone in their pocket begins to buzz about, safely tucked within the canvas pocket of their overalls and _hopefully_ not just as soaked as their hands are. Wiping their palms and fingers on the inside of their legs, they unzip the soggy jacket and tug out the borrowed phone to see the numerous Linkcord notifications—of course.

Leaning onto the front of their motorcycle, Zaya hardly takes a second glance up to the storm just out the window behind them as a few taps and a swipe unlocks the screen, opening up to the Linkcord discussion of the day (night? Night.)

[ _text channel #mom-panic; 9:47 PM_ ]

**banned for baby crimes** zayaaaaaa i miss you  
**Hanami Hagane** You are just saying that because you have no one to drag around the fair.  
**Hanami Hagane** Besides, they will be back tomorrow afternoon.  
**banned for baby crimes** no i’m not!! that’s too long!! i brought ihget but he’s being stupid and wont ride the ferris wheel with me :’)  
**banned for baby crimes** i cant find lunya and reese either so now im stuck with himbo here  
**local breadhead** we’re just by the cotton candy stand! lunya’s waving at you ;)  
**banned for baby crimes** OH THERE YOU ARE HOW DID I MISS YOU hold on i gotta grab the chad first  
**local breadhead** 😊  
**banned for baby crimes** but i really miss zaya even if they’re just over in mor dhona.. so does ochir he- i-  
**banned for baby crimes** has anyone seen ochir ihget lost him in the crowd-  
**this says zaya** 😱 **  
** **reese is in pieces :O(** YOU WHAT??  
**local breadhead **oh dear lmao **  
**reese is in pieces :O(**** i hope no one tries to take him :( **  
**reese is in pieces :O(**** lunya says if your stupid catboy loses zaya’s bird shes not going to make you two the mini versions of zaya’s courier hat **  
**banned for baby crimes**** IT SNTO MY FAULT ZAYA JR HERE WAS BEIGNB ROODY ADN LOOKED AWAY NOOOOOOO,,, **  
**Hanami Hagane**** Why bring the bird with you, anyways. Zaya lent you Ochir’s cage. **  
**banned for baby crimes**** he made sad noises when ihget n i were abt to leave,,,,

The chat quickly devolves from there into Sati panicking about Zaya’s violet-backed starling going rogue and everyone else jumping in and _hells,_ they are not in the mood to manage that. Drops of water fall from their chin onto the screen; they hastily wipe it away before shoving the phone back into their pocket and hop off their motorcycle. A few quick movements with the key round their wrist opens up the luggage attachment with the satchel of papers inside—blessedly dry, thank the gods they splurged on a decent one instead—which they swing over their shoulder as they start walking to the elevator.

A dripping trail has probably followed them all the way from the parking garage to the lobby, they think in passing as they stop at the front desk, waiting for the receptionist to turn around. Their hand goes to fiddle with the small keychain on their keyring as they wait, still dripping their own personal puddle around them.

“Hello, hello! Welcome to the Seventh Heaven, how may I—” Tataru turns around, small smile widening into a sunny bright grin when she sees them, even if they’re dripping all over the lobby. “Zaya! Good to see you back again; need a room for the night, then?”

A curt nod (that sends water droplets onto the surface of Tataru’s desk) is all she needs to hop off her stepping stool and onto the ground, waving Zaya along before she cheerily marches down the halls with a keyring jingling in her hand. Not even the gloomy rainstorm thundering outside can put a damper on her mood, it seems.

“Payment for the night’s stay may be given in the form of Gannet Bay gossip, alright?” Tataru unlocks the door to a nicely decorated room with a quick turn of her hand, playfully winking over her shoulder as she does. Her violet eyes glimmer almost the same as Lunya’s, really; filled with teasing joy and secrets. “I’ve heard from the grapevine about a certain catboy quite enjoying the atmosphere out there, now!”

She steps aside as the door swings fully open, giving a little curtsy, and Zaya gives her an energetic thumbs-up as they walk past her into the room, pleasantly warm and bright from the small fireplace in the corner of the room, banked low so its amber glow only flickers across the floor.

First things first: getting out of all the soggy clothing they’re wearing.

They hang their satchel (papers still neatly bound inside, good) on the wall hook by the door and haphazardly strip off their shoes and socks, followed by the once-warm and fluffy jacket as they look about for spare hangers.

Ah; Tataru always has their back. Hanging on the end of the bed are a set of four or so hangers, which Zaya snaps up with ease, carefully slipping the wooden hangers through sleeves and loops as they finally get to their undershirt—blissfully dry, if not a bit cold. Their overalls aren’t all that damp on the top but are more than soaked the further down the legs one looks… hopefully that dries quick enough.

Just as they finish kicking their ankle-high boots to the mat by the door, a quiet yet unfamiliar chime fills the room, and Zaya nearly thinks to check outside the door for the noise when the light vibrations trickle up their arm. The soft ringtone—someone humming along to a muffled orchestra, maybe; not the smartest of choices for a calling ringtone—grows louder as Zaya stares down at their collection of soggy clothing.

...Alright, second: answer the damn phone?

Zaya nearly fumbles all the hangers to grab their phone from the pockets of their overalls and accept the call, only briefly reading the name from the screen before his face pops up in its place. White hair and a charming grin, perhaps—that is, to anyone who hadn’t heard the words that fall from his mouth like gentle rain.

(Okay, well, maybe that just helped. Zaya wasn’t going to say that out loud to anybody regardless; it didn’t matter what they thought of Thancred’s charms. Probably.)

“...I’d say ‘good evening’ but I wager you are having anything _but_ just by the water dripping off your hair,” Thancred says in lieu of greeting, his voice warm and surrounded by the distant sounds of the usual fall fair attractions. “So instead, I’ll say this; is that old phone serving you well enough?”

Zaya nods; given, this one’s a bit clunky, but the lightness of their actual tomephone may have indirectly been the reason that they’d dropped it while helping out around town and eventually cracked the screen. At least Thancred had offered to lend them his old one for the trip to Mor Dhona in case, just on the off chance someone truly needed their attention, like for lost birds and ways to punish a distracted idiot.

They set it on the table, the front camera facing towards the window as Zaya steps into frame, still fiddling with the hangers in their hands. Mor Dhona may be covered in a gloomy storm, but the golden lights from the buildings around Revenant’s Toll Square still glow brightly in the distance, a refuge from the biting torrent of cold rain.

_“Survived the water,”_ they sign slowly, stepping closer to the fireplace in a subtle attempt to dry off a bit quicker, almost fumbling when their fingers stiffen, chilled to the bone. Thancred laughs, the bridge of his nose crinkling just a tad like how it does when he can’t stop cracking himself up. _“Still has power, too.”_

“Glad to see it has survived, then.” There’s a slight pause where Thancred stops talking (and laughing) to catch his breath, the small silence filled with Zaya leaving frame to go hang their soaked clothes over the fireplace to hopefully dry for tomorrow. When they come back to look at the camera, a kaleidoscope of colorful lights dance across Thancred’s face, some colorfully lit attraction before him leaving his platinum blonde hair awash with a rainbow of color. “The storm there should burn off by early dawn, though; hopefully you will not have to drag yourself home dripping wet from your business in Mor Dhona.”

_Ah, good._ They yawn as discreetly as someone who’s on a video call can—which is to say, _not very,_ and a rosy flush must spread on their face when Thancred chuckles under his breath, low and steady. 

“Forgive me,” he says next, voice lowered as if he were disturbing someone’s rest. “I must be keeping you from collapsing; I can’t imagine a drive in the freezing rain and getting soaked is the least draining way to spend one’s night.”

In-between stretching out the tense muscles in their back and neck do they grunt some noise of agreement, the strain flaring momentarily before melting into a drowsy warmth that drips down the ridges of their spine. Really, spending time in Mor Dhona at all is a draining waste of time—when you make your home in somewhere as vibrantly quiet as Gannet Bay it’s hard to want the big city over the comforts of familiarity, of knowing each shop and its owners personally, of being able to help them all and see their smiles.

At least they can see one person from home, now.

“ ‘S fine,” they mumble softly, heart stuttering when Thancred’s smile widens at the sound of their voice. Part of them wishes they were there to playfully elbow him for that—it’s not _that_ rare tha they’ll speak—and the other part of them they are desperately trying to ignore. “How’s th’ fair.”

“Wonderful.” He looks up for a moment as Zaya wraps themselves in the bed coverings, presumably to whatever booth or stall is shining down on his face with fluorescent lights. “Ryne’s had a wonderful time, I think. I haven’t seen your friends around, but would you like to hear about the odd variety of attractions around?”

Zaya hums sleepily, waiting for him to continue. They hardly even notices when their eyelids grow heavy and their fingers return to their usual warmth, entranced enough by the fond familiarity of Thancred’s voice as they drift off to sleep.

…

The next morning, Zaya wakes with the dawn that rises across Mor Dhona, the bright golden sunrise sneaking through the cracks of the large curtains to tickle their bedsheets. The cityscape outside the window is covered by low autumn morning fog, glimmering as the sunlight dances over it and the puddles the passing storm had left behind in its wake. Outside, it is nearly silent, only a few passing cars and hardly any pedestrians around when Zaya does their morning stretches by the window.

As is always with a trip into the city, they fall into an easy routine; wake with the sun, stretch out whatever they can without breaking something, get dressed and hastily grab everything before rushing out the door, wave Tataru a rushed but genuine goodbye. Trot down to the parking garage, check the bike, throw the satchel back into the luggage on the back as they slip on their stereo cuffs and flick through playlists on their phone before going to get breakfast at the Bismarck—

Zaya pauses their flick-tap scroll through the playlists on their phone when they catch one with _their_ name. Odd; Thancred did always have the habit of making his friends their own personal playlists, but they’d like to think they didn’t give him _that_ much of a read on their tastes just yet.

Shrugging to no one but themselves, they tap on the playlist and let it begin to play as they slide the phone back into their overall pocket, starting up their motorcycle’s engine just as the song begins to play.

They stop. 

[ _DM history with @superbolide; 7:36 AM]_

**zayaya** **❓** **  
****zayaya** 🌅😊❗🎵🎧💿❓❓  
**superbolide** good morning to you too :) you’re up rather early  
**superbolide** something the matter?  
**superbolide** ah i haven’t got another song for you yet, if that’s the question rest assured, i’ll find something yet!  
**zayaya** 🙅

It hardly takes them more than a few seconds to grab a small screenshot of the playlist in question, sending it and another screenshot back to Thancred as they quietly listen to the same song Rjoli and Reese had playing near _constantly_ for last Valentione’s Day in the bakery—still manages to be catchy, somehow. Let it not be said that acoustic covers were not their favorite.

The notification ringtone chimes when Thancred responds, cheery and bright.

Zaya goes a bit bug-eyed at what he types next, the song fading off as the next one on shuffle comes up—piano, humming, _Thancred’s voice—_

Thankfully, for it being so early in the morning, there’s no one around in the parking garage to judge the frankly embarrassing noise they make at their phone, or the bright flush that spreads across their face.

_It isn’t like that,_ they remember saying, sputtering like a fish out of water when Lunya had barely insinuated that Thancred’s small wave as he walked past was a bit more than friendly. _There’s no way he’d be interested in the courier that helped him choose out a ribbon at the local boutique, of all people! He doesn’t even know where I work!_

Zaya drops their forehead onto the dash of their motorcycle, careful not to hit their horns against anything as they do.

Looks like they were wrong, about it ‘not being like that’. Maybe.

(Oh gods, they really hope they’re wrong.)

…

[ _text channel #mom-panic; 8:03 AM]_

💬 _this says zaya is typing..._

**this says zaya 😑** **  
** **this says zaya** 💭🌑💘 **🤟** **❓** **  
** **banned for baby crimes** DOES HTAT MEAN WHAT I THINK IT DOES **  
** **closest to hell** zaya qestir i swear on your lover boy’s life clarify for the peanut gallery **  
** **local breadhead **:0 ****  
****reese is in pieces :O(**** i think hm **  
**reese is in pieces :O(**** zaya did thancred just confess or did somethign else happen **  
**this says zaya**** [ ****superbolide:**** oh haha i must have forgotten to upload those to my lifestream] **  
**this says zaya**** [ ****superbolide:**** there are some songs i did save, but all the clips there were lyrics i thought of after chatting w/ you 😉] **  
**this says zaya**** [ ****superbolide:**** i could make an EP dedicated to you w/ the inspo you gave me] **  
**this says zaya**** [ ****superbolide:**** that is, if you don’t mind] **  
**Hanami Hagane**** I told you he was obvious. **  
**closest to hell**** SATINA YOU OWE ME GUMMIES FROM SHOOTING STAR I CALLED IT **  
**closest to hell**** IT WAS **OBVIOUS** THE MUSIC HES MAKING WAS BC OF THEM **  
**local breadhead**** oh bless… that’s v sweet… ** **  
**banned for baby crimes****** HBHBHHB NOOO MY HARD EARNED GIL,,, ** **  
**banned for baby crimes****** BUT WE ALL WERE RIGHT ABOUT HIM THO ** **  
**reese is in pieces :O(****** awwwauaua!! ******  
****banned for baby crimes****** so ** **  
**banned for baby crimes****** zaya ** **  
**banned for baby crimes****** when’s the wedding ** **  
**this says zaya** 😡😡😡** **  
****closest to hell**** me🤝sati “when’s the wedding” **  
**this says zaya** 👆💀🏡** **  
****Hanami Hagane** You two better start running.  
******banned for baby crimes** WAIT ZAYA NO-


	25. oh, your love is sunlight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #24: beam

It was a simple request made by a few people who’d come down from Idyllshire, really; Thancred doesn’t remember if it was Zaya who offered their hand first or if A’dewah had caught wind of the Arboretum’s vast plant life and (for once in his life) jumped into the fray. Something about  _ training exercises _ and A’dewah looking incredibly energetic for someone who’d just gotten back from a reckless teleport to the Doman Enclave.

The only thing he remembers clearly is getting dragged about by Zaya (unfortunately  _ willingly, _ since he didn’t want to know just what trouble they’d get into by themselves) and a very terrifying ride upon Ochir’s back until they were already in the Dravanian Hinterlands, diving into an abandoned building for…  _ something. _

_ Well, _ Thancred quietly muses as he steps onto the overgrown path and inspects the menagerie of autonomous, hostile plants looking to tear him to bits. The last beams of sunlight overhead pour through the gaps in the shattered glass roofing, the gentle dusk glow of the flora at his feet marking the way forward, and a light breeze that smells faintly of honey drives away any of the rotted plant stench that might be there.  _ At least the journey here was pleasant. _

“Don’t burn yourself out before we even get started, sunshine,” Haruki chirps as he twirls his spear about, a good few fulms away from them all so he doesn’t end up giving anyone a new scar. “The plants won’t be going anywhere—at least, not after we cut them down to size. We can look around a bunch once we get to the end.”

“I—! I have  _ restraint, _ did you think I was going to run off?” A’dewah looks adorably flushed when Thancred turns around to check that Zaya hasn’t ran the other way, or what have you, fiddling with the red and white cords knotted around the head of his staff; he slots that into his memory as something to tell Syhrwyda. Lunya, maybe. 

Unfortunately, a giant mass of plants decides in that very moment to emerge from the surrounding foliage like one of the Ananta’s marids stomping in, staff sweeping across the floor with a vengeance.

It’s a bit of a blur from there, as is with most of his travels alongside  _ any _ Warrior of Light; A’dewah’s voice going from soft to urgent, telling him to go ahead with Haruki as he and Zaya run the other way, the very angry biloko tearing forth from the tangle of leaves to chase them down. Running down the pathway alongside Haruki—distantly, he hopes he won’t receive a spear-end to the stomach like when he’d been helping out Lumelle—angering even  _ more _ sentient plants, vines lashing into his face. Another biloko, out in the open, ducking to dodge a staff to the head and retaliating with a cartridge straight to the thing’s chest—

When he finally gets a chance to  _ breathe, _ between all the plants out for his blood and looking back over his shoulder for their missing party members, he realizes that one particularly giant teal man is missing. He nearly thinks to start calling for him, hoping that he’s just been waylaid by  _ more _ plants or perhaps fallen into a bush.

A small tap on the knee of his boot has him looking  _ down _ at a particularly large korpokkur, very fuzzy and a bit more teal than green. Even without the last rays of sunlight, the leaf of this korpokkur shimmers… oddly, like it’s inscribed with enchanted ink.

“...Haruki?” He kneels down, and sure enough the korpokkur— _ Haruki _ waves his little arms at him, lightly bouncing about. Thancred tries his hardest not to look displeased.

How does one even tell your healer  _ ‘hi again, sorry I got your partner turned into a large, fuzzy plant even though I was supposed to be protecting him’ _ without getting your arse chucked through a window?

“Thancred,” A’dewah calls meekly from somewhere behind him. Oh dear.

He clears his throat once, rising back to his feet. “Managed to off the other biloko yourselves, have—”

Thancred turns, expecting to find Zaya standing behind the poor white mage, and instead finds A’dewah holding his fiery staff in one hand and a small(er) korpokkur in the other. The fading ray of sunlight A’dewah’s standing in makes the waterdrop atop the little korpokkur’s leaf shimmer as it wriggles in his grasp.

“I—um. I guess that the korpokkur behind you is Ruki.” He gently sets korpokkur-Zaya down on the ground, eyes darting back and forth from Thancred’s wounds to korpokkur-Haruki, probably. “D-do bilokos… _ usually _ do that?”

He shrugs in response; he’d never excelled in botanical studies back in Sharlayan and  _ besides, _ these bilokos have had years to grow unrestrained.

“I suppose this wears off eventually?” Thancred tilts his head to the two Au’ra-turned-plants, looking a bit more weary when A’dewah gives his signature nervous shrug.

“I tried Esuna on Zaya already,” he admits, shifting his staff to the other hand and tilting it downwards; the firelight feathers that flutter off the top brush against Thancred’s fingers, a bright summer warmth soaking into his bones and soothing the bruises that litter his arm. “It, er, obviously didn’t work, and I’m a bit out of ideas, so…”

“We wait,” Thancred finishes, settling down onto the uneven ground and feeling a root bump against his back. He pats the ground next to him, meaning to signal A’dewah to sit and take a break as well—he seems very out of breath, how long were he and Zaya running—but korpokkur-Zaya waddles forth instead, hopping onto the back of his hand with an almost-smile. The korpokkur that was (likely) once Haruki stumbles over to A’dewah’s side, nudging his leg carefully when his tail goes stiff.

_ Poof! _

A large cloud of dewy mist bursts from under both their noses—A’dewah’s surprised yelp rings out in the ambient silence—and Thancred leans backwards in shock.

In place of the korpokkurs, two very blue Au’ra stand up, breaking through the fog as they both shake the last few leaves from their hair and horns.

“Good to see you two back,” Thancred sighs, rubbing the back of his head. Thank the gods the transformation was only for a short time; dragging around two chaotic fighters was easier than herding two (very adorable) sentient plants, at any rate. He stands back up, brushing off his coat.

Besides him, A’dewah’s tense grip on his sleeves relax and then suddenly tighten up again as he looks up; Thancred follows his gaze upwards, expecting to see some other plant monstrosity coming to ruin their day, but finds Zaya and Haruki, both with that curious ‘I-have-an-idea’ glint in their eyes, staring forwards.

_ Oh no. _

“D’you think there’s another one out there,” Haruki muses as A’dewah’s tail flicks nervously. Zaya hums, looking down the same way their lancer friend is until a decidedly large amount of leaves start to rustle on their own volition.

Both he and A’dewah bristle as Zaya and Haruki take off running towards the small path of lilypads.

“NO!”


	26. remember me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #25: wish

For the first time in ages, Mor Dhona’s night sky is unobstructed by clouds of sickly purple aether and clouds, stars free to shimmer across the dark expanse as Zaya lazily drapes themselves over the stone parapets that line the roof of the Rising Stones. With the summer warmth during the day, it isn’t so cold, just lying here. Comfortable, maybe, were it not for the bump in the stones that laid directly under their head.

Zaya sighs, keeping their eyes ever heavensward as barely-there footsteps echo up the stairway and to the rooftop.

“Cooled off, I take it,” Thancred muses, making his way over and sitting on the other side of the corner they’ve chosen, legs swinging dangerously over the sides of the building—ignoring the fact that their tail and one of their arms are dangling off the same side, too. “How goes the stargazing?”

It’s a bit of a stretch, but Zaya whips the knee of Thancred’s boot with their tail (not the best of ideas, the echo of it traveling up their spine) and receives a breathy laugh in return. His hand reaches out to lightly brush his fingers across the scales exposed by the odd cut of their pants, a soft warmth in his touch that sends sparks across Zaya’s skin.

“Seriously, though. Is it about to start?”

They nod—well, something  _ close _ to one, seeing as their head is firmly planted on the stone behind them—and Thancred smiles briefly before looking up at the sky, wistfully fond.

“...I don’t think Ryne has ever seen a star shower.” From the corner of their eye, Thancred pulls out something from his coat; a letter, maybe? “Even among all the spectacles everyone put on for her sake.”

Zaya lifts their head up from the stone, cursing the crack that comes from their neck, and raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t react, much, barely holding his arm out as if they would fall should he not.

“It’s rather selfish of me, I think,” he continues, still looking to the skies as Zaya pushes themselves up into a seated position instead of laying sprawled across the parapet. His eyes—healed now, thanks to Krile finally fixing the eye issue he had that Zaya doesn’t know the name of—they shimmer with untold hopes as the first few stars dash across the sky, impatient as they start their descent. “I’d thought of wishing to see Ryne again, you see… but she has her life to live. I cannot continue to—well. Impose myself, as it were—”

“Don’ say that,” Zaya mumbles, throat protesting with a rough and scratchy cough afterwards. “She wanted t’ stay. With us.”

Thancred laughs again, swallowing the starlike brightness of it down as he looks down from the stars with barely watery eyes. The stars that fall into the sky behind him brighten the off-white of his hair, shimmering flame dying out as it disappears beyond the shadows of buildings.

“I know,” he says. “I—I do honestly miss her. Seems a bit unfair of me, doesn’t it, to wish to see her when I spent the first three years of knowing her keeping myself away.”

“But y’u started to change—even if it took almost dying.” Zaya scoots over the rough stone to reach his hand, fingers hesitating for but a moment. “‘s worth a lot, to her. She misses you too. Couldn’ find her when I went back with Lunya n’ Hanami.”

Zaya raises their hand to his chest, feeling the beat of his heart quietly as he hides his sniffle.

“She’s here,” they say, thinking of the pink ribbon tied to his coat and the gunblade that Gaia says Ryne’s been trying to train with. Thinking of sterling blue eyes that asked them to promise  _ he’ll be safe, he’ll make it back home with you _ and of a shield of auroral light when he’d called to them, said  _ take her and find Urianger, let no more harm come to her. _ “As long as you remember her, she’s here.”

The star shower above their heads continues on, but Zaya can’t help but keep looking at Thancred’s face even as it is, turned heavensward rather than to them. Gently looking to the skies above the Crystal Tower like it were the sole connection they had to the First—and in a way, it  _ was, _ the place where G’raha had started it all.

“...Right.” Thancred spares one last moment to wipe his sleeve over his eyes before glancing back down at them. “Would it hurt to write a few letters, now and then?”

Zaya huffs, flicking the side of his head.

“Who said.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title literally could have been something i thought of but it was because 'remember me' from coco came up on my spotify while writing this and now im sad


	27. defying fate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #26: when pigs fly

“Dzoldzaya.”

Reunion’s twilight silence is broken by her mother’s voice, Ochir rustling his feathers with a confused squawk as Dzoldzaya turns, a stormy look to their eyes. Only the few merchants who had traveled across the Steppe were around, the quiet sounds of the marketplace being pitched for the day swallowed by the wind. If she had only left earlier, if Magnai and Sadu had not stopped by and said their goodbyes in lieu of pleads because both of them knew her fate laid elsewhere—

“Come back home,” Odval calls, her songbird voice gentle even as her face remains stern. “Your brother’s temper has cooled.”

Dzoldzaya huffs, tail flicking as she turns back around to continue fixing the saddle that sits on Ochir’s back even as Odval’s footsteps come closer. Her brother has never cared to listen, only to drag her along and learn the markets as he has so the two of them might one day fit in better among the peace of the Qestir and not among the warriors of the Dotharl and Oronir.

If it took her leaving for him to change, he does not deserve to make his apologies.

“Your sisters will worry,” she continues, stepping ever closer. Ochir nearly moves to stumble away, only Dzoldzaya’s hands on his wing keeping him from straying from his spot. “When you do not return, they will think you dead.”

“Then  _ let them,” _ she hisses. Odval shrinks back, then, eyes wide as Dzoldzaya steps back and hops onto the fencepost by Ochir’s back.

And before Odval can say anything more, Dzoldzaya takes to Ochir’s back and flies away.

…

They arrive at Reunion near twilight, yols darting across the skies as the bustle of their home settles down into a warm evening. The glow of the aetheryte paints the khan’s yurt turquoise, still just as Zaya remembers it.

Everyone steps into the little settlement with exhausted excitement, ready to collapse after the trek from the Ruby Sea to the Steppe, but Zaya stops at the gate, laying their palm against the rough stone of the wall. The walls were not here before, the sheep’s pen so much emptier and the yurts more tattered the last they recall of Reunion, but it is still much the same as before.

The place that made them strong, forged their soul in silence and skies wider than those in Eorzea. The place that drove them away, drove a stake between them and their brother through petty differences.

When they look away from the top of the watchtower to the path before them, a single man waits in their way, widened eyes of moonstone bordered by sapphire as Tehra’ir and Syhrwyda sidestep around him. Moonlit where they are moonshadowed, a lance now strapped to his back where Zaya remembers a bow and quiver being.

Oktai stands sentinel, shocked behind his mask.

_ You can’t avoid your past forever. _


	28. blurred reflection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #27: free day | accept

Keeping a decent distance between him and… well, nearly  _ everyone _ in Mol Iloh was turning out to be harder than expected, with how small it was and how close they were to running off for the Naadam. A’dewah had been meaning to keep himself busy while everyone finished preparing, all he needed already woven into the aether between his palms and the elements of the Steppe.

It was not the first time he would fight, in this sort of way; he remembers earning his and Tsukiko’s keep, back when the Qestir had a fighting reputation that matched that of Zaya’s today. The aether here was not as unfamiliar as he led Hien to believe of him; a safeguard, maybe. He’s not sure why Hanami hasn’t ripped a hole into his lie, let Hien know he’s much stronger than he makes himself sound, let him understand that Zaya is not the only force of nature he lives among.

(When he was little, he had been requested by the the Fists of Rhalgr, before the king had threatened and ultimately destroyed their temple the year after he’d been asked; something about a recommendation from an Ala Mhigan friend of his father’s and the nature of his aether. Half-remembered as it was, he’d only been able to recall his mother holding him close when the monk stepped forward, beckoning him forth with bruises and scars lining his arms and face that had probably scared him.  _ A trip to the Temple for the day, _ he’d offered,  _ to see if the way may fit you as well. _

_ My son is staying here, _ his mother had said, maybe. Once in a fleeting dream, when her garnet eyes did not look to him with betrayed confusion as he froze, the Garlean behind her with his blade drawn and the tip digging into her shoulder blade.  _ I do not care if he will serve you well or if his heart is strong enough for fighting, I will not let you make a soldier of him.) _

The wind that blows over the Steppe sings with a chill, cutting clean to A’dewah’s bones when he looks over the distance to Reunion, Ochir circling overhead. Zaya, Tehra’ir, and Syhrwyda had all stayed behind after Bardam’s Mettle, after Zaya and Oktai had come to entreat Magnai and take back those who did not intend to fight for the Mol, if at all.

He wishes he’d let Zaya take him back, grab his wrist with lightning in their palm and drag him back to the markets with a grin.

Instead, he’s here, staring off into the distance as Hien gives the Mol and everyone else a pep talk, wondering what he could have done if he’d known and told everyone of his crime before Yudai had done it for him. Wondering what he could do if he were not so easily bent to the wind, so easily bent by the force of Hien’s words and the weight of what he wants to do with his knowledge of the Steppe’s ways.

(The Garleans made a soldier of him where the monks of the temple had failed, had torn out the green loam and cosmos from his hands and placed magitek and alchemy in their wake. Said his “help” was welcome in the fight against the Liberation Front even if all he did was burn cures and scald skin back into shape. Tried to make him detest the brightness of Doma and Ala Mhigo and give him the pride of the soldiers that surrounded his waking moments, cultivating a garden of unhealthy fear where he should be fearless.)

Hien was still speaking, voice bright and cheery enough to fill the hollow of A’dewah’s heart where he missed Haruki’s constant presence but not enough to make his stomach settle. Affirmations that the Mol will win this year, light-hearted banter enough to strangle the breath out from his throat.

A’dewah swallows it down when Hien looks to him, beckoning him over with a hearty wave.

“My friend,” he says, soothing but in the wrong way. “Are you prepared?”

_ To decide, _ he thinks to himself as he grits his teeth, letting his lips curl into a half-smile that unsettles Cirina when she looks at his eyes.

_ (Never use your magic for something you are not sure about, _ his mother chides fondly, the quiet jingle of the bell hanging from her cane always the sound that brings A’dewah home.  _ The aether will sense your uncertainty, make something you do not want from your well wishes. _

_ But what if I have to anyways? _ He’d been bright-eyed, bushy-tailed once in a lifetime, always so eager with his wand in hand as he made little fish from the water and flowers bloom from mud. He couldn’t have imagined being forced to use his magic, couldn't have dared to think about what someone else might make him do and how far he’d be willing to go to escape it.  _ What if someone’s in danger, and I have to use a spell I’m not so good at? _

His mother had sighed then, placing her hands on her hips with a cheery smile and a mischievous glint in her eyes.  _ That’s why I’m going to teach you all I know, _ she hums.  _ Everything I have will be yours when I’ve finished; all the books in the library you will have read, all the spells you see me doing yours to weave. _

She leans down to tap his nose, ruby red nail between her son’s garnet eyes, the same as hers. 

_ Promise me this, little cosmos, _ she says.  _ Promise me you’ll never turn these spells against those you hold dear.) _

“Yes,” he lies, hands gripped around his staff enough to make his knuckles white.

...

(Sunflowers glimmer over the edge of his handwoven barrier, golden glow where once he made blue moonlight to keep another safe as he now turns the barrier against the person he’d swore to himself he’d protect. His staff is somewhere in the wreck—dropped it when Sadu set off a fireball too close to him, ran when he saw Magnai turns his gaze to him after he’d cured the wound on Tehra’ir’s side in a blink of the eye.

All he has now is the aether that pools deep in his chest and the shield that blooms from his hands.

Hanami’s greatsword nearly cracks his resolve before she hefts it back, eyes wide as Oktai behind him chases his sibling down to where Hien has already cleared the path. She doesn’t need to ask  _ what are you doing  _ when her coldfire eyes go wide enough to strike icy spears through his heart, doesn’t need to scowl to send his heart racing as he takes a deep, shaky breath.

“I will not fight for Hien,” he says simply, collapsing solid aether back into the palm of his hand and letting the marigold motes shimmer back into the Steppe’s own. “Forgive me.”)


	29. there's nowhere love can't reach

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #28: irenic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me? here with yet another wol/npc ship? its more likely than you think.  
> (mostly an AU, really; probably not going to write more in the long run but you know how it is with braincells and disobeying :^) )

It’s been moons since she woke in that little cabin in the Shroud understanding that she had survived what most would not thanks to the Warriors of Light, and still Ysayle struggles to wrap her head around it. How they could come up with such an elaborate plan to keep her tethered to this realm, away from Menphina’s hell of frozen hearts, and how they could bear to watch over her for years. A lifeless body left to rot as the soul persevered, missing half of what made it as it kept silent vigil over its resting place.

And yet, and yet—here she is, now, in the Rising Stones of Mor Dhona, where the sun is not clouded with snow or fog and she is welcomed despite the horns that now curl around her ears. Guided home by a trail of ice and greeted by someone who knew just what it was like, to have a being larger than yourself settle beneath your bones.

Even at peace as she is with what Syhrwyda had done to keep her alive, she’s still unsure of where she may stand among the people of Ishgard. Too afraid to learn, too stubborn to ignore them completely. A standstill, frozen in place as she watches those who come down from Coerthas give her a hearty berth.

(She has not dared to call towards Shiva since she’d woken, truthfully; unsure if she would rip herself away from the warm embrace of the earth, cover the land in frost now that she is less blessed than before.

To none but herself will she admit that the Mother is no longer as precious to her as she was before, even if her blessing has not been stripped away by the time it took for her to return. So willing to give up on her as well, so ready to take her back into her embrace even though she had realized she was not done burning bright.)

The Scions do not ask too many questions—Urianger’s eyes are much too curious for her liking, Y’shtola’s own already having discerned the dragon’s blood in her veins and ignored it for want of other troubles—but none seem to mind her keeping to herself, much. Solitary even in company, like she was before, as Lady Iceheart. As someone else. A distance kept to keep the fires in her followers alive as she stumbled through a never-ending blizzard, a incessant cold that stripped flesh from bone as she held her crystal to her chest.

_ (I think winter’s quite nice, in its own way, _ she had said, calling out into the wind as they climbed up Sohm Al, her axe traded for a tome, however temporary.  _ Snow’s not too common down where I grew up. _

_But does it not kill your crops?_ Ysayle had asked in return when she remembered what Syhrwyda had called herself—merely a farmer, seeking newer crops in Ishgard—wondering just how it could be _nice._ _Does it not drain the life from what is usually so lively?_

_ Sure. _ She hadn’t denied that, turning to her and carefully lifting her hand towards the snow they had left behind in the mountains far away, snow glimmering with the sunlight as they cloaked the grey stone of the peaks.  _ But the land will return, and isn’t it beautiful, too, for something to weigh so heavy and persist?) _

The Rising Stones, in the wake of the Scions’ return from their ventures, is relatively peaceful in the chaos—she’s sure someone could say a piece about the eye of the storm and be correct, in this matter. It is a pleasant change from the solitude of her little cabin, back in the Shroud, but she still lingers at its edges, fearing what she might reveal should she stumble too close, fearing what she might ruin with her years-wide gap of memories made.

Syhrwyda approaches her every time, regardless of the years that they have missed together, regardless of that last question Wyda had asked her before she stayed in Coerthas and she took off to the Sea of Clouds. Resilient and persistent in her nature, working through the ice of Ysayle’s fears with the patience of wind wearing down mountains. Brave even when her hands turn a shade of powdery blue under the aether of Ysayle’s hands, warm when she lightly kisses at Ysayle’s temple regardless of the small bump of ice that sits nearby, at her hairline.

(Always fearless, like the land covered by frost that did not know when the winter would cease. Frost could kill a great many things, send a great many others into a timeless stasis until it retreated under the sunlight, but the earth persists and so too do its plants. Even without words, Ysayle can see the confidence hiding in Wyda’s honey sunrise eyes, sure that she will survive the new chill of Ysayle’s hands and lips as she holds her close, beckons her to join the other Warriors in Mor Dhona rather than spend the rest of her life wondering what else she could love, now, with her thawed heart. What else she could love but snow, where else could she wander with her newfound freedom.)

“Are you, perhaps,” Syhrwyda says, her earth worn hands dwarfing the frost of Ysayle’s own, keeping her still, rooting her to the ground instead of flying away with the wind. “Interested in joining us on a little adventure around the world?”

Ysayle could not deny her anything, a truth she had realized long ago when she had heard her cry as Shiva plummeted from Azys Lla’s skies; not a quiet, frosted kiss then and not a promise now. Always 

“So long as you’re there,” she answers, feeling that ever stalwart spring in her chest bloom once more, the permafrost faded for the time being. “So long as you keep making that path forward so I can follow.”


	30. how i met your (other) dad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #29: paternal

_ Once upon a time— _

“Is that how we’re starting this, Ruki?” Papa huffs as he sits down with a steaming teapot and three wooden cups, no less smile-y than Dad even as he elbows him in the ribs. The plate of snacks in his other hand he pushes to Mune—oooh,  _ melon pan. _ He looks up at Papa before picking it up, giggling quietly as he can at Papa’s silly wink. “Really now,  _ once upon a time?” _

Dad’s smile widens into a grin; the kind that he gets when he’s made a really,  _ really _ bad joke. “Of course,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Can’t have storytime without a  _ properly _ narrated story, right?”

Mune groans between crumbs as best he can without spraying them all over Papa’s new tunic as they both wait for Dad to continue.

_ As I was saying—once upon a time, in the not-so-distant lands of Yanxia, an Ala Mhigan conscript of thirteen summers snuck out of the fairly-new Castrum in the dead of night, a small bag of kobans clutched to his chest. Don’t worry; those are important for later. Also, don’t steal money that isn’t yours. _

_ That night, he had a mission: to deliver the secret stash of kobans he found to the nice couple in the village nearby. He’d snuck out dozens of times before, with the weird size of the ventilation in his room, and tonight was no different as he crawled through to land outside. With the moon and stars hung high in the sky, he didn’t have to worry too badly about his poor vision in the dark until he passed into the Gensui Chain— _

“That’s not that important,” Papa quips as he pours out a cup of tea for himself—it kinda smells like the flowers in their garden, now that Mune breathes it in. “Your hair was—”

“Shh! Let me get there.” Dad reaches out and steals Papa’s cup with a surprise kiss to Papa’s forehead, taking a sip before setting it by his foot.

_ The problem was, since he almost got caught the last time he snuck out, he would have to take a different path in case horrible Miss Prisca had told the night watch to keep an eye out for any escaped miqo’tes! So even though his usual path would take him to Namai in barely half a bell, he wound his way through the Fanged Crescent through another path he’d only traveled once. _

“I dunno how you managed to dodge the main path, actually,” Dad admits as he takes another pause to drink. “The mountains everywhere make it pretty hard to get around unless you took a falcon.”

Papa shrugs. “Maybe being born and raised in the mountains of Gyr Abania gives me an advantage?”

_ Regardless of how difficult that would normally be for any kid of thirteen summers, he was a lot stronger and braver than most  _ (“I—I wouldn’t say that…”)  _ and eventually ended up… somewhere not quite along the path that he had intended. Just across the river was Namai, its aetheryte casting a blue glow across the plants that he had found himself surrounded with, but to get there he’d have to pass through the farmland he ended up in. Without moonlight to clear his path, he cautiously walked through and over plants, keeping an eye out for anyone who might still be working… _

_ But, unfortunately, he managed to miss the quietly watching boy through the squelching sounds of his boots in the rice paddy— _

“That’s not it,” Papa says decisively, tearing Mune’s attention away from Dad as he sets down his cup of matcha. Dad makes a funny almost-whine, but he turns to Papa too with a grin that might as well say  _ go on, then. _ “Well, er, the rice paddy bit is true, but…”

_ Unfortunately, in his hurry to get away from the farm, he found that the boy with shockingly teal hair had seen him and was approaching. In his hurry to get past, he tried to run past the boy, but found that the other kid was much taller and bigger than distance made him appear, so when they were barely ilms away from each other the boy accidentally tripped the escaping kid! The kobans held tight in his arms scattered as he fell, golden coins lining the bottom of the rice paddy he was now soaked in. _

“Hey, my hair wasn’t that bad when I started out, Dewah,” Dad says, and his voice has truly made its way into whining territory now. “Shockingly teal? No way.”

“Ruki, it was the middle of the night and I could  _ see _ you. For being a miqo’te, my night vision is  _ horrible,” _ Papa says with an apologetic smile, resting his hand atop Dad’s. “So either it used to be a lot better than I thought, or, uh, your hair  _ really _ was. Not good. A-anyways, uhm…”

“Wait wait wait, let me tell this part.” Dad straightens up and rubs his hands together. Mune wouldn’t ever say either of his dads have ever looked like they were up to something, but Dad’s certainly giving it his best to look like he is.

_ After noticing just how tiny and alarmed the kid who tried to run by him looked, the Au’ra boy pulled the miqo’te boy up gently— _

“I almost went flying when you pulled me up? I-is that gently?”

_ —pulled the miqo’te up  _ **_energetically_ ** _ from his seat in the mud, and said… uh... _

“...Dewah.” Dad turns to Papa, setting his hands on Papa’s shoulders with fake seriousness. “Do you remember what I said, because I sure don’t.”

“Y-you  _ don’t?” _

Dad tilts his head innocently. “Not really?”

“You asked if I,” Papa says, and Mune can’t tell if he’s about to cry or laugh, really; his face scrunches up in the same way for both. “If I was… was Tamamo Gozen! B-because—”

Papa breaks into a round of poorly muffled giggles, and Mune does too. Dad looks like he’s about to hurt himself, with how hard he’s thinking about what Papa said.

“Your fur and hair were  _ white _ when we were thirteen!” Dad drops his fist into his palm like it was some kind of important revelation, only leaving Mune to laugh harder. “And with your giant ears and red eyes and the robe—”

“Hey, my ears were not  _ and _ are not giant!”

“You looked  _ exactly _ how all the stories described the shrine maiden!”

Papa stops giggling to look straight into Dad’s eyes, a smile still tugging at the corners of his eyes. “D-did you think I was a  _ girl _ on top of all that?”

Dad’s silence tells both Papa and Mune all they need to know about  _ that, _ sending all three of them into another round of laughter that makes his stomach hurt. Papa’s completely fallen over into his own lap, curled up in a ball while his tail lashes about behind him—it’s probably a good thing that Dad’s pulled away the teapot and the cups to his side before the two of them completely lost it.

_ A-anyways, after that mess of a conversation, the two boys exchanged names—Haruki Hagane and A’dewah Tia… and that’s how we first met; two fools confined by the reach of the Garlean Empire, taking what they can and making the best of it. _

“Wait, I’m confused,” Mune cuts in, breathless, much to Papa’s dismay—aw, his ears pin down when he tilts his head.

“And I thought we were telling this story to our son, Munehise. Did he leave while we weren’t looking? Sneaking around looking for more snacks, maybe?” Dad pushes him his cup with a suspicious grin.

Dad’s just  _ barely _ close enough for Mune to playfully slap his leg in retaliation.

“I know that Papa was a conscript back then, and that he’s from Ala Mhigo,” Mune says, tapping his forehead as he thinks. “And obviously you met as kids. But you said that he left when I was still a baby, before even Hana-oba left, so…”

“How did Dewah leave Yanxia?” Dad asks in his stead, and even if his dads are trying to hide it he can still see the way Papa’s hand curls tight in Dad’s hand. Mune nods. “Well, if he’s okay with telling it…”

Papa nods, clearing his throat and putting on his bravest storytelling face Mune’s seen yet.

_ This story happens nearly nine years after the two first meet in a rice paddy, summer fireflies surrounding them in the humid night, and much like a summer breeze does one A’dewah Tia make his adventurous escape... _


	31. the better path

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt #30: splinter

_ Herein I commit the chronicles of the travelers. Shepherds to the stars in the dark. _

...

Atalanta was the worst student Emet-Selch had ever been assigned, truth be told.

He was loathe to admit it in passing—hells, not even Lahabrea knew just how  _ bad _ they were—but now, in this moment, staring at the multifaceted crystals sitting innocently in the cup of his hands as his would-be student scampers out of the Bureau to Asteria’s calls…

_ Why did I let Elidibus sway me into this, _ he thinks, rolling the pile of crystals about in his palm. Not horrible; these were the perfect sort of crystal to hold a variety of concepts, and of different colors rather than the white and orange the Convocation apparently decided a long time ago was standard.

But he had asked for a proper concept of theirs, not some piddly crystals. Atalanta was always too jittery of a student—it was almost like they had too much soul in their body, only contented enough to remain still and listen when surrounded by others. Haik was always his first choice to tug along if Atalanta truly couldn’t sit still; he could have done without the sappiness that came with him, but at the very least he did not try to constantly insult him much like Hecate and Lelantos tried to.

If only he’d asked him to keep watch over Atalanta’s assignment.

He sighs—louder this time, and he can’t even be bothered to care if Hermes hears him from his desk—and carefully shifts the pile of shimmering stones about some more until a crystal of sunset gold shuffles its way to the top. Decently sized, but not large enough by any means to hold any concept much bigger than a desk, perhaps.

Sunset gold, he thinks. Like Asteria’s eyes, Melisseus’ bakery, Hemera’s aether in parts.

Emet-Selch finds himself with a smile, even frustrated as he is with his student’s chaotic attempt to please him once more. Perhaps he can at least get some use out of these.

...

_ Though the world be sundered and our souls set adrift… _

…

He doesn’t remember how long it’s been since he worked on the crystals that now sit idly on a desk in his Amaurot. Whittled them down to shape, not knowing enough of Atalanta’s spontaneous creation habits to unweave the aether and expect them to come out the same crystal and color, and carved sigils into them by hand. Azem’s crystal, ever sunset gold, sits atop the pile, gleaming bright in the teal glow that manages to permeate even the sunless veil of the sea and into the building which he now stands. 

Under it, he can see six other familiar sigils, eyes wandering to the one of sapphire blue he buried beneath the rest in his aching.

_ (Stay home, he remembers telling them. Stay home with Haik today. Just today.) _

He quietly walks to the table, eyeing the pile with the crystals he was expected to hand over to Elidibus by the next turn of the sun, wherever he was. The damned moon, probably. Strange man.

_ (Why? Atalanta looks to him curiously, fluffy locks falling over their eyes, shimmering like the night from afar. There something I shouldn’t be around to hear?) _

Something in him keeps him from pouring his aether into the memory crystals and erasing it—surely destroying the last reminders of those he cherished would make their memory fade. Surely he would no longer be haunted by their shades in his waking moments, scheming for their return even as they looked down upon him for it.

_ (The Convocation has a meeting today, he says calmly. A difficult one; that was not a lie.) _

Instead, his hand grasps the seven crystals and tucks them neatly into the pocket lined into his little coat, securing them safely against his heart.

_ (I do not wish for you to hear how the world is ending, he does not say. Your lightning bright spirit would sputter out if you knew your days were numbered. _

_ And as much as he tried not to get attached to his worst student, he couldn’t.) _

...

_...where you walk, my friends, fate shall surely follow. _

...

Since Temulun Khatun had given them their name, Zaya had wondered how hard it was to escape fate if your name  _ was _ ‘fate’ itself.

Perhaps it truly was impossible—fate wasn’t something Zaya could tear apart with their hands, after all. The world had always been known to be wicked in its ways, weaving new paths for every change rewritten into the stars; if Zaya did not almost die in Ul’dah’s banquet they would nearly fall to Shinryu’s claw, if they did not tell their feelings in full when they could have they would have come out eventually with the interference of one certain lovely branch. 

But on the seafloor of the Tempest, in the walkways of a fading city with a sapphire blue crystal in hand that whispered the same things that Valor did, sometimes, Zaya couldn’t help but think of the times that fate was, perhaps, on their side.

Without Tehra’ir’s intuition and sharp thinking with his sister by his side, Zaya would surely have died to Ilberd’s scheming hands, filled with poison and malice as he threw them into a cart meant for the dead. Without Syhrwyda’s quick hand and taste for primal’s aether, there would have been no Demi-Shiva, no opening for Ysayle to be saved from her choice of death to lead them ever heavensward.

Without Duscha and A’dewah, maybe Papalymo would have disappeared for them just as Louisoix did for them at Carteneau; without Lumelle and Elwin, Ishgard surely would have shunned them for their scales, dark as night and as tough as Dravanians. Without Valdis, would they have even left the streets of Pearl Lane the same, not knowing just how many were out there like them, struggling in a jewel not made for them?

(Without any of them, would Zaya be standing here, in the streets of Emet-Selch’s grief, staring up through that sunless veil and wondering what tomorrow would bring?)

_ Of course you would, _ their shadow whispers next to their horn, crystal clear and sharp around the edges where they were once soft-spoken; an after-effect of Minfilia’s last gift to them, surely.  _ Just not the same as you are now, perhaps. _

“Zaya?” Tehra’ir calls to them, standing hardly a few yalms away with Lunya looking back by his feet, Hanami and Reese stopped a step or so ahead. “Ye alright there? Yer lookin’ a tad wistful now; don’t tell me yer—”

They immediately raise their hands to deny any sort of sentimentality for Emet-Selch’s city; the spires may be tall and beautiful, but it is a bygone place. A landmark of grief and naught else.

(And yet, and yet, their shadow lingers a moment more when they step in time with their trusted friends and most precious allies. Lingers, then fades, time slipping through their fingers as Zaya walks further and further away.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaAAAA I MADE IT! oh my god i made it through another year of ffxivwrite despite the hell that is 2020 and the failure of several political systems ;W;
> 
> truly, thank you to everyone who read and supported my writing this year!! i wrote like,,, a good 10k or so more than last year haha,,,
> 
> this fic should be getting some edits/slight reworks throughout the rest of 2020 as my time permits! stick around and maybe you'll find a fill that has more words sometime in the future ;)


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